Julia Reidy - brace, brace (2019)

Slip
'brace, brace' is Julia Reidy’s soaring Slip return: a dread-tinged incantation unfurling from breath-down-the-neck field recordings, auto-murmured voice, synthetic hum, and irrepressible guitar kinetics.

Reidy's signature 12-string playing - precise, burrowing, rhapsodic - dominates the LP's outer cuts, framing a plaintive electric centre. Blooms of arpeggiations and desolate strums re-inflect slow-moving pitch sequences; the music feels at once on fire and graceful, inevitable.

Perhaps most surprising is how organic 'brace, brace'’s expanded palette feels. Reidy's electronics are subtly eerie extensions, alien resonances of her playing, both embedding her instrument and making it somehow unreal. This strange smear of body and apparition is neatly nailed in Reidy's sung-to-herself vocals, coaxed out and encroached upon by autotune.

Succeeding issues of her work by Feeding Tube and Room 40's A Guide To Saints, 'brace, brace' is a definitive statement from a blazing, restless talent.

The LP tours with visuals from Suze Whaites. Whaites' projection environment is built from the coruscant light sources and surface reflections with which her video footage is made, creating mutable vistas at once microscopic and panoramic, domestic and sublime.