Edge Games by Jules Reidy & Sam Dunscombe

Although Berlin-based musical seekers Jules Reidy and Sam Dunscombe are friends who’ve worked together in numerous contexts over the last decade or so, Edge Games is their first, long overdue collaborative album. Over two expansive, mind-bending excursions the former’s microtonal guitar lines are woven into a gorgeously unstable mass of synthesis, field recordings, and clarinet produced by the latter, but it’s important to note that the recording process was deeply collaborative, with a rigorous yet generous back-and-forth between the duo’s sympathetic aesthetic tendencies. As Dunscombe earnestly jokes, “Think of it as being written by Jam Dundy, a synthetic person who exists when our powers combine.”

In recent years Dunscombe has pursued an adaptation of what she calls a “post-Romanian-spectralist idea of ‘Mass Plasma Synthesis,’” building a thick morass of churning sound from literally thousands of clustered sine waves that creep around using a set of pitch relations, only to be deftly subverted. It’s one of the many ways the project illuminates the album title, creatively and playfully straddling and skirting different edges. This decision gives that crushing din a delicious instability, “a sort of uncanny valley between the linear and the cyclical (the sacred and the profane),” as Dunscombe says. Reidy, playing a custom-made guitar with adjustable frets built by Berlin instrument maker and designer Sukandar Kartardinata, embraces the illusory dichotomy between static and active in the dense electronic foundation with ornate microtonal lines that alternately float atop and burrow within the churning tumult.

Reidy’s guitar functions to create movement and action within Dunscombe’s dense fields, simultaneously in foreground while functioning as subversive agent shifting the musical evolution. Dunscombe subtly dictates the terms framing the guitarist’s narrative shape directionality by constantly reframing and complicating the internal harmonic logic. Yet, neither musician adheres to strict rules or roles, offering another insight into the album title: in shifting combinations each seems intent on smudging, ignoring, and crushing borders—in shifting combinations. “The musical ‘edge games’ we play capture something both positive and negative about our times, says Dunscombe. “We work through the materials in the ways we try to navigate a complex and often hostile world.”

Still, grasping the music’s conceptual underpinnings are hardly required to appreciate its enveloping power. While there’s a loose ambient feel to the music on Edge Games, it’s far too vigorous and mutable to function as something played in the background. The meditative “Gracelords” shimmers with spectral brilliance, a vibratory drone as weightless as it is immaculately detailed, with Reidy’s restrained guitar figures deftly drawing out and interacting with the peripatetic flow of the electronics. Things get more visceral on the second piece “Dancing Anyway,” a howling jam where guitar feedback perpetually threatens to topple the sonic edifice, forming a corrosive bond with the rheumy harmonics of bass clarinet. “Feedback is another example of how you can ride an edge, keeping things balanced just right so that they don’t blow out of proportion,” explains the guitarist. The music summons the force of a volcano, with the two musicians weirdly frugging along its crater, dangerously close to a sonic abyss. The 19-minute piece seems to cycle like an industrial machine, chugging like a sick locomotive, yet larded with fresh details and shifting perspectives emerging with every spin.

Reidy and Dunscombe both possess deep curiosity and a shared commitment to discovery. Musically speaking they both reject boundaries, and their devotion to ignoring any sort of aesthetic border only adds greater resonance to this remarkable album’s title.

Futura Resistenza is a Brussels-Rotterdam based record label
"Speramus meliora; resurget cineribus"