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Reed Richard
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Connection Reveals Possibility
clearing the mind
Bending Reeds
Musical Limb
Moving fluidly between acoustic spiritual jazz and experimental electronic soundscapes, each album reveals a different facet of an artistic vision. Reed's recent trilogy of releases demonstrates this range: from highly produced electro-acoustic experimentation to pure, unedited spiritual jazz saxophone improvisations, to collaborative sonic storytelling.
In his electronic work, Reed crafts complex sonic landscapes that bend and break conventional forms, layering processed sounds with improvisational elements. His acoustic work strips away these layers, revealing vulnerable, patient explorations that speak directly to consciousness itself. When collaborating with other musicians, he creates rich narrative soundscapes that explore themes of ecological transformation and cosmic evolution.
Throughout all three approaches, Reed's music maintains a consistent philosophical core - the marriage of technical mastery with emotional depth, structured patterns with free exploration, and individual expression with collective consciousness. His work has been described as "unprecedented" and "savagely beautiful," with critics noting his ability to mirror the natural evolution of thought and weather patterns through sound.
Review by: Ryan O'Doud Issues Magazine #82 3.1.24 My Impressions: Melodic as it grabs the hinged joints of the music, the tunes have a deep, harmonic resonance and exhaustive reach. They are improvised written like instants on the wind. They bend and break, meander, wander, and come straight at the listeners. They are a collage audio of arpeggiated notes, harmonies in deep, spreading undualtions, running, and mixing, tripping and dancing amongst one another in an environment of free play and abject sincerity. There are long stretches of pure ambiance. Amplified visions creaking and cracking in rainstorm dilations. There are computerized boolps and blips, 4-bit orchestrations like John Cage on a Coleco vision. There are beautiful, patterned sections of 60's-style ambient jazz that uplift the eyes and ears, the soul and mind. There are random gyrations, metallic absences, perfect tunefulness, and dissolutions of radio burst noises. This album fine-tunes and synthesizes a number of classic avant-garde genres. It has moments of classical atonality and serene passages of ambient maneuvering. It has established ministrations of jazz spiritualism and bits of industrial clang and crash. This is a real unleashed soul, the projection of a singular mind setting itself like paint onto a canvas as noise onto space. There is no need for external imposition or expectation here. This is not for the pop sensibility. It is a pure emphatic explosion of egoistic joy. http://www.orderofcelestialintegration.org/issues/
Review by: Ryan O'Doud Issues Magazine #90 11.01.24 My Impressions: It is always a joy when someone sends me something that I can say iss truly unprecedented. The range and quality of genres and tonalities in this beautiful and bizarre collage of sounds keep me interested no matter how long it continues. I can't really say these are songs in the traditional sense. They don't rely so much on contrast or continuity as one would expect. Instead they appear to augment in an evolutionary, or even stream-of-consciousness, way. They are a sublation of normalcy and yet they kind of take the place of the normal discontinuity of life that our brains are ever seeking to break up with the mundanity of perception and order. The way that I view this is sort of like weather, sped up from a week's progression to an hour and without any serious events- tornadoes, hurricanes, etc. At times it is almost savagely beautiful, intertwining elements of spiritual jazz and soulfulness, singing melodies and harmonic resonant basses. But at other times the music is more pensive, broken, often even incomprehensible. It just sorts of happens as it snaps and shifts, occupying the sound space around my mind. There are profound breaks in the structure of the pieces. There are long passages of chaotically blurred randomness. There is tension and harmony. There are even strange eruptions of cosmic space age noises, clicks, clanks, off-FM synthetic procurements. And then, just as soon as it has deconstructed itself, it simplifies into a beautiful and resonant flute melody. This, as best as I can say, is the true inheritor of the psychedelic movement that crashed into the dead end of the early 70's. Because the tonality is really well accustomed to match the pacing of the unfiltered mind. The changes happen with the same lucidity- as well as the same imperfect pacing- of the thoughts and feelings rushing across the interior consciousness. And then, all at once, the cacophony begins again. The din drowns out the beauty. We don't really fully control the pace of our own thoughts, do we? http://www.orderofcelestialintegration.org/issues/
Review by: Ryan O'Doud Issues Magazine Issues Magaizne #92 01/01/25 My impressions: Really beautiful work here. The sinuous melodies expand and contract with a patient hesitation. The introversion and feeling is present. There is a real vulnerability in the playing. Even so, the more intellectual and technical aspects of jazz are here as well. The music appeals to the mind as well as the heart. Not to say, most of all; the ears.