Jordan Reyes - Fairchild Soundtrack + Border Land (2020)

The Fairchild OST and Border Land EP are works that Chicago-based Jordan Reyes conceived as two distinct projects, however, as they were written and conceived it was clear they were cut from the same kind of spiritual cloth. Faichild OST - a soundtrack commissioned for the short film by Kali Kahn - and Borderland are filled with the same kind of patient, unfolding modular synthesizer work that Reyes debuted on his 2019 album Close.

According to Reyes: “Spacelessness is the central theme on Border Land, three pieces I recorded while in motel rooms on my January 2019 jaunt out to the East Coast. Motel rooms and highways are sacred spaces for me - touring alone is exhausting and transcendental. Hurtling down highways, you watch the landscape change, but are removed from it. Your environs is a purchased ecosystem. Motel rooms blend together. Even in new cities, you’ve inhabited that room. When you exist in these intermediary, interchangeable spaces, it can be disorienting and psychedelic, especially after long days of driving and playing shows - at the precipice, things slip, reality shifts, the unseen is more easily felt. I tried to channel that feeling while recording Border Land, feeling outside, and considering how it feels to step out or step in, deciding whether something has just finished (“All Things End”) or something is about to begin (“Touching Down”).


The Fairchild Soundtrack is an interesting thing to put in opposition to Border Land - as I opened myself up to spacelessness and timelessness on those recordings, I opened myself up to an external influence on the Fairchild Soundtrack. I had never made a soundtrack before, but my long-time friend Kali Kahn had a new short film she made - Fairchild, which was commissioned by Borscht Corporation in Miami. I was curious to try my hand at soundtracks, so I offered my help. Kali had very clear ideas about what she wanted, and the result is a mixture of my reactions to the images she captured, and her ideas of how it needed to sound. There was a substantial amount of back and forth, which is obviously quite different than creating music on your own. The concept of innocence rears its head throughout the film, and I tried to capture that through my synthesizer for the soundtrack