Jules Reidy - Trances

Sometimes a title does all the work for you. And so it comes to pass with Jules Reidy's swift follow up to 2022 favourite World in World, a format-stretching 45 minute journey through zoned-out guitar hypnosis. Reidy is a masterful, sophisticated player, here tuned in Just Intonation and fully adept with both open strumming and fingerpicking. The results are appropriately radiant, the open-ended harmonics cascading and undulating in near-psychedelic ways, and all the way out there and back experience that's only partially re-grounded by Rediy's alien processed vocal insertions. The human voice snaps you back into the room, but only just, auto-tuned in such a way so as to feel slightly discomfiting in itself, as if some extraterrestrial transmission stumbled upon in the psychoactive fog. Trances thus stands as a kind of futurist rendering of Fahey, Basho, Rose and the like, rendered in the kaleidoscope palette of a kind of komische spiritualism, moored only by LPs limited run time. You can imagine a live version of this that never ends. Some multi-verses are more privileged than others.