Jules Reidy will release a new album, Clerestory, on September 25th via Thrill Jockey. The Australian-born, Berlin-based artist follows their Thrill Jockey debut Ghost/Spirit with a record that sets aside dense song-construction for something more open. Side A, Shadow Symmetric, is a string quartet realised with the celebrated JACK Quartet; the B-side, Clerestory Windows, refracts the same material through a solo lens.
Reidy developed Shadow Symmetric with JACK Quartet over two years. “Clerestory explores a harmonic world built from collections of pitches related to one another as a tone and its shadow,” Reidy says. “In Shadow Symmetric, realised by JACK Quartet, these harmonic relationships give rise to subtle acoustic phenomena and fleeting shifts in perception.” The piece runs two pitch sets from the same starting point, scaled differently to produce what Reidy calls “two offset spectral layers.” Close but not identical, heard together they yield near-unison and a kind of warped consonance. The quartet’s four voices enter in staggered fashion across successive harmonic blocks, and the music carries the stateliness of an early Baroque chorale, with a melodic theme threading between instruments and tuning systems.
Clerestory Windows mirrors that quartet in distorted form, a sequence of episodes that remake the material as if seen through panes of stained glass. It draws on Reidy’s 2025 Stockholm installation Inside, Crystals and Circuitry, moving through MIDI strings and voices, lyrical 12-string guitar, stretched string tones, flickering RMI arpeggios, and finally staccato electric guitar settling into spacious chords shadowed by sine tones.
KLOF recommended Reidy’s collaborative album with Andrea Belfi, dessus oben alto up, last year. Listen to the Shadow Symmetric excerpt from the new album below.
Clerestory (September 25th) Thrill Jockey
Pre-Order: https://julesreidy.bandcamp.com/album/clerestory