PETAL TONES by Bradford Reed

Creative Notes:
This album could be categorized as new age music in deep undercover disguise. It’s what I wish someone would put on to help me relax, zone out, or be present — since the music usually played with that intent generally has the opposite effect on me.

This record is intended to help listeners settle into their surroundings by transforming their perception of where they are in space and time. The music can function as wallpaper or as a series of paintings. It’s not meant to be emotionally manipulative, but rather to suggest concurrent alternate realities.

There should be enough footholds in its varied musical landscape to feel welcoming — familiar sounds, rhythms, and harmonies — but these will diverge, hopefully guiding the listener gently into introspectively compelling and soothing territories, or ideally, to the mystifying places I inhabited while recording it.

These vibrations are offered in counterpoint to the nefarious algorithms drilling for consciousness in our digital age. Yet I also embrace the magnificent possibilities technology presents for capturing and creating sound. I love synthesis and all forms of processing, and I use them as extensions and magnifiers of humanity and human gesture.

I used compositional processes to build upon and expand intuitive rather than cognitive choices. I hope listeners can connect to this music on a basic level — like going on a hike — as nothing in the wilderness is tidy or symmetrical, much like the structures of these pieces.

I love being in the high country as much as I love making music, and I find it’s in nature’s destruction, chaos, and rough edges that true beauty exists. I hope these pieces evoke an appreciation of nature in all its splendor, complexity, and ambiguity.
I offer this album as a tribute to life’s beauty and mystery — both around and within us. I hope it inspires you as much as it inspired me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqnoFsvlP_Y

Liner Notes:

A sonic alchemist at work, this album opens a window revealing the experimental scientist Bradford Reed at work in his laboratory. The sound of homemade instruments whispering, groaning, and reverberating…the album’s opening track feels like a haunted soundtrack to a lost expressionist horror film. Weird harmonies plucked from the ether as springs coil and crackle with electric rhythm. And yet it mysteriously still all grooves as the record continues featuring the bass strings of Bradford’s homemade pencilina, plaintive saxophones cry in the distant cloud of abstract spectral harmonies, bowed string instruments, musical saws, saturated and distorted snare drum rhythms all fuse together, coalescing into an incredibly unique and deeply hypnotic musical language. Bradford Reed’s music takes us down into the unfathomable depths of a sonic ocean, we travel like a submarine exploring the sunken caverns of resonant musical territory. Strange and beautiful.

-Zach Layton

Bradford Reed is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, and producer who fights and tames the idiosyncrasies of the pencilina, an original instrument of his own design and construction which he’s performed with worldwide over the last three decades.

linktr.ee
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