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PREORDER
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ARTIST
TITLE
Clerestory
FORMAT
CD
LABEL
CATALOG #
THRILL 663CD
THRILL 663CD
GENRE
RELEASE DATE
9/25/2026
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"A clerestory -- a bright or 'clear' level or 'story' -- is an upper section of wall, most often in a church punctuated by windows. It is a powerful image for grasping this luminous new music from Jules Reidy. Light casts shadows, of course, and logics of shadowing, mirroring, and distorted reflection -- of key importance for Reidy's work as a whole -- inform the sumptuous surfaces of Clerestory. 'Shadow Symmetric' is a string quartet commissioned and performed by the JACK Quartet as part of their JACK Studio program. Reidy's pairing with the quartet is felicitous: JACK are one of the preeminent new music ensembles working today, with a particular interest in just intonation, an important component of Reidy's music. It is primarily a music of harmony, but rhythmic organization is key to its effect: arranged as successive harmonic blocks that at times overlap, with staggered introductions of the quartet's four voices often serving to key the listener's attention into the blurring of the near-unison pitches, the music moves with the stateliness of an early Baroque chorale. Through it, there threads a melodic theme, passed between instruments and tuning systems, almost at the threshold of perception but with the same yearning quality familiar to listeners of Reidy's guitar works. 'Clerestory Windows' offers up a distorted mirror image of the string quartet, arranged as a series of episodes that each remake the material in their own way. It begins with an arrangement of the string quartet material for MIDI strings and voices, repositioning its rigorous harmonic exploration somewhere between the Lovely Music Ltd universe and a '90s RPG soundtrack. This episode derives from Reidy's installation Inside, Crystals and Circuitry, held in Stockholm in 2025, made up of multi-channel sound broadcast by transducers in suspended sheets of glass illuminated by spotlights, producing a mysterious effect where shadows appear more palpable than the sheets themselves. The piece moves into a lyrical 12-string acoustic guitar air performed at the installation opening, before the strings from the first side reappear, now frozen and stretched into slow-moving waves, with electric guitar tones rippling across. From this emerge flickering arpeggios, achieved by arranging the string quartet material for the RMI, an early digital synthesizer. Clerestory is a meditation on fundamental dynamics of human experience: orientation and disorientation, the hazy borders the hazy borders between the material and the spiritual, and the instability of identity."
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