Jules Reidy: A Space That You're Allowed Inside

An extensive interview with the experimental guitarist and composer

Jules Reidy came to Berlin from Sydney as an ambitious young guitar player, finding inspiration in the city’s rich experimental music scene.

Their recent acclaimed solo records, World in World (Black Truffle, 2022) and Trances (Shelter Press, 2023), focused on longform pieces and suites based on just-intoned guitar and idiosyncratic autotune vocals.

A new album for Thrill Jockey, Ghost/Spirit, appears more song-oriented than Reidy’s last works. In the midst of the end of a relationship and a personal transitional process, they’ve written some of the most openly accessible and immediately gratifying material of their career.

I met Jules in Berlin in early February 2025 for this in-depth interview. They’d just come back from a six week stint in Australia.

photo: Camille Blake

What’s your earliest memory of sound?

The natural environment in Australia. I grew up in the middle of Sydney, on Wangal land, but even in what’s now the inner city, it's such a rich and exciting sonic environment. That backdrop has probably informed my tendency towards maximalism and density. As early as I can remember, I was obsessed with wanting to make sound.

Did you get musical education from early on?

No, I was very self-taught all throughout my childhood and adolescence. My parents were not particularly musical. When my big brother got a guitar, I was like, ‘I want that too.’ I got my own guitar when I was about 14. I had access to the internet from a young age, so I was just figuring stuff out by myself. I also played a bit of piano, and I was into singing – just a very musical kid with a sensibility for form and writing songs. I always loved doing that. I would write songs, little poems and stories, that was my creative world. But I didn’t have an instrumental practice, or even a particularly serious relationship to the guitar. That came much later.

What kind of music did you grow up on?

My dad loved the Beatles and the Beach Boys and would play that kind of thing. In high school, I started to develop my own taste for music. I think my first hero was Avril [Lavigne]. Having a genderqueer – I guess the word people used then was “tomboy” – influence was important, but a lot of the music I listened to as a kid was of this emo dude vein. The sincerity and outspokenly emotional quality of that stuff appealed to me. “Emo” has become a kind of ironic thing now maybe, but at the time it felt pretty real. I would swap mixtapes with friends from downloading music. It wasn't YouTube or Spotify yet; we were still able to access anything we wanted, just without the algorithm. I remember swapping burnt CDs from friends.

Where did you go from there, musically?

I did the classic thing where I was really into the bands of my time, and then I obsessively listened to what they listened to. So I listened to a lot of early punk stuff like Patti Smith, The Clash and The Stooges, very obsessively and thoroughly. I used to go to local CD shops, though I couldn't buy anything. I'd take photos of the CDs and go home and look them up. Then I started working in a CD shop. Because I got so good at writing the blurbs for the metal section, they gave me a job. I’d go deeply into anything from punk to death metal and hardcore and all that heavy music stuff.

Later you went on to study jazz guitar. How did that happen?

I was curious about how to develop a sound and my own language. I was into the prog metal bands of my time, and then again was checking out their influences. So like Tool, and then King Crimson. Then I got into Robert Fripp and Brian Eno. From prog I also got into free jazz and fusion, always sort of reverse engineering.

I was in a normal public school, but when I was 16, I discovered that there's a school for music in Sydney, which is still a public school – you could just audition to get in. I ended up going there, and I got into this idea of learning how to play guitar properly. I could play power chords and shit, but I couldn’t even read music. So I wanted to learn that, and then I discovered this jazz guitar paradigm. I got really good at playing jazz, and then I went to a conservatorium and got really obsessed with learning that language.

But then you stopped and left the traditional jazz scene behind as well.

Well, through that network of people, I discovered the experimental music scene in Sydney, which was at the time focused around a couple of groups and festivals. There's this band called The Splinter Orchestra, that’s existed for ages, and has a kind of rotating cast of members, it’s very inclusive in a way but also very specific in its style. I was involved in that band. They play very environmental music, and they're often playing outside. I got a real sense of how to play in an installation way, not thinking about music as this linear thing necessarily, and just developed a different language around extended guitar techniques and thinking more about sound rather than music vocabulary. That was my gateway to developing my own language.

Is that where you started experimenting with alternate tunings?

When I started to practice jazz, I was thinking I’d have to tune my guitar normally now. Before that, I always had the intuition to detune it – not so that it sounds fucked up or anything, but just to find the tuning that sounded good. I think I'm still playing in that tuning basically. I just have a system for exploring the tunings further and with more precision now. But for a few years in my late teens, early 20s, I was interested in this non-idiomatic free improvisation, Derek Bailey kind of thinking and getting influence from that community in Sydney that were playing this environmental music, thinking of sounds as objects. And then, so many of those people had a relationship to Berlin. I just wanted to leave, basically, and see some of the world, because I had never done that.

You’ve lived here for over ten years now. Did you ever plan to stay as long?

The people in my community were talking about Berlin as a cool place to visit. And I wanted to go over, like, in a semester break, and listen to some stuff and maybe meet some people, so I came here. I mean, I did buy a one-way ticket, so maybe I was sort of planning to never come back. And then, that's what happened.

Some well-known Australian experimental musicians lived here already, like Oren Ambarchi or Tony Buck from The Necks.

I mean, those people are certainly huge influences, and were at the time. The Necks were one of my favorite bands. Oren’s music has always inspired me and opened all kinds of doors in terms of how to think about playing guitar. Tony and Magda Mayas, they have this band called SPILL. That was a concert that I saw in Sydney, and I thought it was the best music I've ever heard. But when I moved, I didn't have any friends here. I'd never really met those people, or only very briefly. I had a good sense of the scene in Sydney and I really got as much out of it as I could, but the people of that community that lived in Berlin I'd never met.

In your first couple of years here, you immersed yourself in the scene. It seems you took every opportunity to be on stage.

Totally, yeah. Despite being very driven, I hadn't really found a musical voice yet at that point. I was just interested in putting myself in situations where I could learn. When I moved here, I was playing sessions every day, going to concerts every night, like two or three concerts, just running around like a crazy person. At that point, it was still cheap enough to live here. I could work in a cafe and play shows, and that was enough.

I was lucky to join the Splitter Orchester within a year of living here, and our first project was with George Lewis. We were recording at SWR in Stuttgart. I didn’t even know what they meant when they talked about “the fee” – I thought I would have to pay for it! (laughs) The whole thing of being a touring musician was completely brand new for me. I got to meet a whole bunch of my heroes within weeks of living here. It was insane, really exhilarating.

After spending essentially a third of your life in Berlin, you’re still calling Australia ‘home’, so what does home essentially mean to you?

It’s an interesting time to be asked that because I just came back from six weeks in Australia and I hadn't thought about it as being home for a long time. I really felt like I have my home here now. I don't know what it is. When I was back there this time, the experience of reconnecting with certain formative places, people and spaces definitely gave me a home feeling.

And that exists here too, for sure. If I moved away from Berlin, then I would be so smacked by nostalgia every time I returned. But this place is also so transient, things move and change so rapidly. A lot of the spaces that have been important to me don't exist anymore, and my entire friend circle keeps changing. I love that about Berlin though. There's a new influx of people every second, basically.

photo: Camille Blake

Do you remember how you started writing and releasing records after you moved here?

I was always writing songs, and always had a strong work ethic. I was excited about producing music and cared about it a lot and held myself to a high standard. I remember being frustrated with my bandmates, because I'd get these little groups together and wanted us to practice. They were always making fun of me, like, ‘you should just go solo man.’ That’s always been there. In 2014, I put out the first little EP, but I took it down on my Bandcamp because it's a bit embarrassing. That was the first year I lived in Berlin. I recorded a bunch of solo guitar pieces on a semi-hollow archtop guitar.

How did you develop your sound further from there?

I had few important mentors, one of them was Kim Myhr, a Norwegian 12-string guitar player. I was playing in this resonant, tremolo-y, sustain-y duration way, and he was like, ‘You shouldn't play this on electric guitar. You should try to play acoustic.’ He let me try his 12-string, and I saved up and bought one. It was perfect to experiment with resonance and sound and tuning. I feel like I found my voice on that instrument.

Another mentor was my friend Dean Roberts, who just passed away. He came to my first concerts and really made me feel ten feet tall. He said I should be playing solo and gigging all around the world. A friend of mine recorded my first album All is Ablaze in his studio, and the second one, Dawning On, was recorded by Dean's students at this institute in Berlin that he was teaching at for a while. These two and the third album, Beholder, were all pretty much solo 12-string guitar albums with some electronic elements and voice.

You received a lot of media attention around Vanish, which came out in 2020, and your profile kept building from there.

I don't know, I try hard to protect myself from caring too much about how my records are received. It doesn't always work. I do think of brace, brace, In Real Life and Vanish as being a kind of triptych. brace, brace was an emotionally important record for me. I was singing weird deconstructed songs that felt very vulnerable and exciting. And I was using autotune, which was… well, to be honest I thought it was pretty fresh at the time, now it’s kind of everywhere. (laughs) That was in 2018. And those three records, they sit in one world for me. That feels like a suite of music. I guess Vanish got a bit more attention because it was on Editions Mego. But I had released records on Room40 and Black Truffle before, and I really appreciate having those incredible platforms.

After that triptych came World in World, a very different record...

It was a conscious departure from that 12-string guitar and electronics world, which had been my thing for years. World in World was a lockdown psychosis record. It was all about this special instrument – this guitar with a fretboard that is re-threaded, and it's capable of playing in just intonation. Prior to that, my approach to tuning was still very intuitive. I understood just intonation, and I would use that to tune my guitar and to think about open tunings. But once you put your hand on the fretboard, you're basically playing detuned guitar.

On this custom-built guitar, I've moved the frets around in order to be able to play the specific tuning that I want, and the pickup is hexaphonic, so there's a different output for every string. Instead of plugging it into an amp and having a mono signal, I can take a signal out of every single string and then process it or do whatever I want to it. On World in World, I’m using a different pedal after every string, and you can hear all the on and off pedal stoppings on the record. This is a very analog record, just one person in a room, whereas Trances, which came right after that, is more in the digital realm and sounds much smoother.

The new record, Ghost/Spirit, feels more song-oriented than the last two albums, mainly because the tracks are shorter and the vocals are more prominent. How did that happen?

When I'm writing a song, usually at some point I abstract or deconstruct it, but this time I just didn't do that. Not that it's always that simple, but all of the songs on this record occurred to me very quickly. I think you can hear that too, because it operates as a song cycle. There's a lot of callbacks and thematic repetition, like a big theme and variations. It was during a very transitioning moment in my life, and everything came to me very quickly. The bones of the songs came to me within a couple of weeks.

Would you be angry with me if I said it was your pop record?

No. Please, go ahead! (laughs) I mean, the most work that I've ever done has definitely been on this record. It's so dense, every song is like 50 tracks. Production-wise it was a nightmare, but formally, it's much more simple or straightforward. I hope that no one will be disappointed. I'm making the next record now, I’m not sure that’ll be poppy at all.

I understand that some of the songs were inspired by Anne Carson’s writings, specifically The Glass Essay.

Yeah, just these frozen images of someone in a grief state, or a transcendental state of being broken apart, they really struck me. Her writing is so crystalline, she can just render these images in such a ridiculously effective way. That's what I was trying to do in terms of capturing a mood – render these spaces that felt very emotive, or full of emotion, but that were also narrative and inclusive, like a space that you're allowed to get inside of and be inside of, and it feels like a little world, and the mood is all encompassing, but you can also let it wash over you in general.

What I'm trying to do with my music is tell stories, but not in such a literal and explicit way that it's overwhelming. There’s still enough turning over and abstracting and moving and framing and reframing, that you're allowed inside.

You’re using a lot of samples of musicians from your community. What was the process like exactly?

I never told anyone to just play something and I’ll put it on my album. I was more like, ‘Dude, play this 7/4 and that's enough. Okay, stop!’ It was really sampling in the smallest sense – getting chunks of sounds. The idea was kind of twofold. One, I have a whole bunch of great collaborators that play beautiful instruments. Two, those were, for the most part, the closest people around me in the period of time that I was making that record, which was a time when I needed a lot of people around me. They were my little angels, so I put them on the album.

You mentioned that transformational process you were going through. The press bio also refers to a story of heartbreak that happened in that time.

The name Ghost/Spirit is respectively describing two experiences of love, one being worldly and one being divine. I feel like there are Ghost songs and there are Spirit songs on the record. The essence of some of them is that I’m sad about a specific situation, a relationship with a human, and the essence of all of them, but some in particular, is this prayer or this invocation of something divine, this love without an object. That's the theme of the record, for sure. It's just the knowledge that whilst human life and that being all about relationships is so contradictory and impossible, there's this abundant love for the universe that exists beyond that. And that's something that we can take confidence in when things are difficult.

Two songs open up the sides of the record – ”Every Day There’s A Sunset” and “Every Day There’s A Sunrise”. Knowing this is very reassuring, isn’t it?

Yeah. For example, change feels so unnatural, and the comfort that you think you want is to hold on. But actually, the thing that ends up being the greatest comfort is letting go. And it can take forever, but the understanding that the time will just keep going, and my life will just keep happening until it doesn't, is the most comforting.

Can we talk about mysticism though? I tend to think that music can re-enchant our lives, which have become increasingly rational and non-mystical.

I would agree. There's definitely a potential for magic in the arts and in music. And people are drawn into sacred environments again. They want to be immersed, they want to be taken up. But yeah, I have a contemplative practice, I would say. I've always been very interested in Buddhism, though I was raised kinda Catholic. I don't believe in a God, but I'm a very spiritual person, and I’ve explored a lot of writing, like Simone Weil has been very influential on my life and this record as well, lyrically, in a very concrete way. And that school of composers such as Henry Flynt, C.C. Hennix and Arthur Russell, there's such a pull towards spirituality, esotericism and mysticism within that school, and these are all my heroes, you know?

Do you adhere to a specific spiritual practice these days?

I've been through different phases. At the moment spirituality feels integrated into the way that I approach music. That's actually all my music has been about since forever, not just this record.