Reid’s process was exhaustive and exhausting. She wrote and recorded the music in “cells,” instrumental phrases and riffs that could last a few seconds or whole minutes. Listeners using the SOUNDWALK app would move into different zones that triggered the start of a new cell, while the last one was still playing. “Sometimes on one cell you’ll have chords and on another cell you’ll have a melody so that the chords are reframing the melody infinitely throughout time,” Reid says. “After a long time, they kind of sync back, and then you throw another layer on top with a counter-melody or another texture that adds another element of time.” No two people who used SOUNDWALK had the same experience. Reid refers to the project as a “mindfuck,” and that seems like an understatement.
Composition should have taken Reid about six months, but the first wave of COVID-19 lockdowns in March 2020 further complicated the process. This was, accidentally, the perfect pandemic art project, something that could bring to life public space but be enjoyed alone, outdoors, in open air. Reid realized that, in this new context, SOUNDWALK could take on “a different kind of significance.” Six months of work had to be condensed into six weeks. But the urgency was worthwhile, and after premiering in Central Park that September, SOUNDWALK spread across the world. Reid has composed site-specific versions of the project for public spaces around the world, including Griffith Park in Los Angeles, Primrose Hill and Regent’s Park in London, Ueno Park in Tokyo, Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, and Fairmount Park in Philadelphia. Each has its own sounds and textures, its own relationship with its surroundings.
The music that Reid composed for the project had its own, distinct beauty though, and Big Majestic, released last month, brings the SOUNDWALK project to a more conventional album. The scale and grandeur of the original project aren’t lost. From the utopian-sounding horns, synths, flutes, and strings that open the title track and return on “Sunrise in Central Park,” through the more heady collaborations with British jazz saxophone luminary Shabaka Hutchings, and the almost imposingly slow-moving tracks with San Francisco-based Kronos Quartet, Big Majestic has its own distinct sense of wonder.
Translating SOUNDWALK, what Reid refers to as “endless music,” into something more “finite” was, she says, an immense challenge. “We have all these different tracks of cells that are going at different times. How are they going to sync up to tell this one story of this one epic SOUNDWALK that Big Majestic is? The whole thing is one composition with elements that echo between the different songs and themes that come back and forth. I had to remove the looping of the different cells and make it more fixed, sometimes cutting minutes of music to make it all flow together.” She created her own narrative arc for the record — quite literally. She imagines Big Majestic as a mountain, with the first half of the album an ascent and the second half a return. There are themes and riffs from London, Los Angeles, Tokyo, New York and beyond, and Big Majestic is a walk through all of them and none of them at once. “It’s kind of this parallel thing where I’m going up this imaginary mountain and also, in my mind’s eye, at Captain’s Roost in Griffith Park, in Primrose Hill in London, and in Ueno Park in Tokyo,” Reid says. “It’s this dual journey.”
