Clerestory

A clerestory—etymologically a bright or ‘clear’ level or ‘storey’—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, which presents a side of their work quite distinct from the dense song-constructs of their Thrill Jockey debut Ghost/Spirit. 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 and the interplay between its two contrasting sides.

“Shadow Symmetric” is a string quartet commissioned by the celebrated 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, for many years an important component of Reidy’s music. The piece makes simultaneous use of two pitch sets, beginning from the same starting point but expanded using different scaling to produce what Reidy describes as “two offset spectral layers.” The two sets of intervals are close, but not identical; when heard together, they produce uncanny effects of near-unison, of perfect consonance grasped in a warped reflection. The piece’s gentle pacing and constrained dynamic range invites us to become immersed in its distinctive language of static resonance, complex beating tones, and subtle harmonic surprise. It is primarily a music of harmony, but rhythmic organisation 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.

On the flipside, “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, as if seen through individual panes of stained glass. 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 emerges flickering arpeggios, achieved by arranging the string quartet material for the RMI, an early digital synthesizer. This cues a move into more active terrain, preparing the way for the delirious final episode, where the string quartet material is re-arranged once more, this time for staccato patterns of stuttering electric guitar notes, eventually giving way to spacious chords shadowed by a pair of ringing sine tones. Like all of Reidy’s music, Clerestory is no mere formal exercise, but a meditation on fundamental dynamics of human experience: orientation and disorientation, the hazy borders between the material and the spiritual, and the instability of identity.