Sarah Belle Reid - MASS (Extended + Remastered)

A Closer Listen

According to Markus Popp the main culprit in electronic music is the term “music” itself. This becomes a very accurate proclamation, especially when taking under consideration the long lineage of artists, non-musicians and composers who sabotaged the musical canon by interjecting new rules, non-rules, new extra-musical methods, and liberating gestures of experimentation against the mainstream, classical and dominant voices. Often the sculpted texture and the structure of the sonic material becomes the structure of the work and the work itself, as Stockhausen often described in his writings.

We could easily permutate or substitute the adjective “electronic” with other classifications or labels such as experimental, noise, avant-garde and electroacoustic but still the point would remain valid. In some of the said genres, there is often a genealogy that has a strong gendered and aesthetic etiquette that repeats itself and makes a canon that is almost inescapable. Attention to tonal, spectral, granular, directional (mannerisms and) details is important to create an oeuvre of mastery and awe. In this very exclusive club of auteurs and composers, we have encountered glimpses of female members who meaningfully contributed towards expanding the thresholds of the genre. 

Sarah Belle Reid’s remastered and extended MASS follows on from the earlier EP she released under the same title in 2021, adding to the existing core of the work  (Passage, Collide, Mass) two new compositions (“Vessel” and “Sublimate”).  pays homage to all these artists-explorers and experimenters whom the artist listened to extensively before embarking on the creation of the album. Some of her companions in the making of MASS were, as she cites, Else Marie Pade, Daphne Oram, Eliane Radigue, the Locust, Edgard Varèse, Maryanne Amacher, Dick Raaijmakers, Naked City, Mr. Bungle, and Thomas Ankersmit.

Sarah Belle Reid’s personal trajectory of discovery from formal musical education as a trumpeter towards the more open framework of Fine and Musical (perhaps Sound) Arts can explain her willingness and aptitude to constantly break, subvert and self-sabotage her own voice in MASS. Everything is constantly negotiated and morphed into something new in the album. Mastery perhaps becomes mockery (in a good and critical sense) and vise-versa. One might feel they are exposed to some “heavy and serious” electroacoustic masterpiece only for such a certainty to be exploded into grains of noise in the seconds to come,  such as in the 11 minute opus “Sublimate.”

In tracks like the opener “Vessel,” one cannot be sure whether this is actual “music” or the soundtrack from a Giallo film. We are constantly transposed from genre to context to form and back only to find ourselves in more new beginnings as in the following track titled “Passage” where time becomes slowed down and we are surrounded by a rather dense chorus of suspended tones of voice, trumpet and modular oscillations. “Collide” is then throwing us back into Reid’s sonic blender where we need to reposition our listenership between aggressive electronic masses of sound and granular motions that transpose between foreground and background. A very strong movement of particles that resurfaces and continues in the closing track titled “Mass.”

This is a listening process that perhaps is insensitive to the context of the listener or alternatively demands an open and less assertive ear. When listening to this album, most probably the listeners will not have set up their own personal acousmonium or be in an auditorium decorated with grandiose loudspeaker orchestras but in their own spaces. The soundworld in MASS could potentially be better experienced in such a listening context (as most electroacoustic works are) but Sarah Belle Reid prefers to push our listening towards the expanded possibilities of the quotidian and standard album format and this is indeed a very interesting effect.  Edgar Varèse had faith in the creation of new instruments and how they would allow him to “write music as [he] conceives it, the movement of sound-mases, of shifting planes, will be clearly perceived in [the] work, taking the place of the linear counterpoint. Sarah Belle Reid’s MASS is a testimony and homage to Varèse’s vision. MASS is an album that could and should be listened to in one go, without stops and gaps, as one long composition in order to experience the scale of its complexity and depth. (Maria Papadomanolaki)