Jordan Reyes has been on the fringes of the Chicago music scene for several years now. His solo project of experimental analog synth compositions has produced a handful of hypnotic records that are tailor made for late night trips down the headphone wormhole. While his association with legendary local musical revolutionaries ONO has led to a professional relationship, as he has released their newest concept record Red Summer on his label American Dreams. We caught up with Reyes in the midst of the great quarantine to discuss Closer, his newest collection of synth works: how music has shaped his life: and his history with the one and only ONO.     

JR: Jordan Reyes

You put out your second record of solo synth compositions early in April. How long does it take to write just one of the songs featured on Closer?

JR: Closer is actually the fourth collection of synth compositions under my own name, but it was created at the same time as my first, which is Close. These songs are from late 2018, when I was finally confident that the sounds I was making were songs. In some ways, I wrote each over a handful of hours, and in others a handful of months. When I began creating music with a eurorack modular synthesizer, I knew I wanted to create patient, gently blossoming songs with melody and intrigue. It took months to get there - for one thing, acquiring the necessary gear was a project in itself, but learning rudimentary synthesis outside a fixed keyboard synth was new. Even learning something like how voltage is tracked for pitch was novel. I grew up in music - I played piano, trombone, sang, danced, taught myself guitar, and it imparted a universality in the way I think of music, a flattening of instrumental hierarchy. All instruments function the same: once you learn the mechanics of how to wield pitch, tone, character, timing, etc, you can do anything. So, for me, once I had learned the means to craft the type of song I was interested in making, I began learning to arrange. Much of what I was doing on Close and Closer was making consonant stems and percussion. I would create a synth part from one oscillator, then another, then another, then another, then another, and I would weave them in and out, all the while manipulating things like a filter cutoff, modulation, and adding some randomization. I recorded these songs live, and some took a handful of takes after creating all the stems, and some I nailed on the first shot. There are no edits or overdubs on Closer, which is different from how I work these days. Now it can take me weeks to get one song right, orchestrating and recording properly, but I am also approaching composition differently.

The bio for your debut Close mentions you started playing analog synth as a way to help you maintain sobriety?

JR: I have to admit that I hesitate to call myself sober anymore. Over the last few months, I’ve been allowing myself to indulge on occasion, and it’s nice. I no longer am the person who had the problem with substance abuse anymore. It’s weird when you realize that you can have a healthy relationship with certain chemicals after not believing it was possible for years. I was sober for six years, and it was the best decision I ever made. I still live as a sober person in mind; beer is, as I said, an indulgence, a treat, not a regular thing. Weed is functional, I have a medical license after I realized that it could help me with my stress and sleeplessness, which had gotten out of control. I don’t like not being sober now, which is a key difference. More than one beer and I am upset I can no longer read as well. The rate at which I absorb words from a page slows down, and I have no time for that handicap. Another difference is that I am never bored. When I had a troubling relationship with alcohol and drugs, it was because I was unhappy with my life and had no reason to live aside from getting to the next weekend. Now I have difficulty figuring out how to spend my time because there are so many incredible things to put inside my mind!

How has the instrument helped you in this way?

JR: The synthesizer is a means to lose myself. As I wrote about for Close: creating music through a synthesizer is like running for me or any kind of menial task that allows me to forget myself. I repeat an action or become so buried in a machine that my consciousness seeps from my physical system and into something else. Almost out of body. Regardless of my state regarding sobriety, this is an important practice for me, it hones my ability to erode the ego and forces me to remember how much of our existence is transient. All of it, actually.

American Dreams and American Damage are your label and distribution companies. What led to the formation of a label through your interest in distro?

JR: Well, when I quit my last job, which was kind of a managerial role in a warehouse, I had started selling records from my collection. I love records, am obsessed with records; but I love being able to live more. I had planned to quit my job for a while, and realized I had all these records, some of which were very rare and worth money. At first it was tough deciding to sell some off, but I quickly started to get the same satisfaction from selling them as I did hoarding them. Fast forward a bit, and I had raised like $15k from just the beginning of selling, and I started thinking to myself: “Okay, it’s nice to have this lump sum, but I need a revenue stream as I’m making this transition,” so I started hitting up wholesalers like Forced Exposure, Light in the Attic, The Business in Anacortes, All Day Records, as well as specialty labels and distros in Europe, Japan, and Australia. I figured, okay, if I want this record from Japan, and have to spend $25 on shipping, I’m sure someone else wants it, but just wants to avoid shipping cost. So I tried to curate my distribution off that, which has been very satisfying. When I moved back to Chicago in December 2017, I was praying to get just one order a day, then trying to get 100 orders a month, then a dollar amount, you know how it goes. Making these quantifiable goals that I could beat and move onto the next.

How did you move into the label aspect?  

JR: The distribution and record selling aspect is fun and I love living in a pile of records, but I’ll say that curating a label is so satisfying. The label feels very personal to me. I’m involved in all of the art, design, aesthetic, and creating specialized merchandise; but it’s a means to actualize someone else’s wishes, and I feel like I’m building a team of superheroes. I know that’s kind of dumb, but I always think about it like the X-Men, like getting all these mutants to work together or to share facilities. I’m a far cry from Professor X, though admittedly we are both bald, but I’m definitely inspired by his vision. Ha ha.

ONO, the legendary Chicago experimental art band, has put out their new record through your label this week. How did this relationship form?

JR: I was partners with Robert Manis at Moniker Records from 2015-2018. Robert is the impetus for my involvement with ONO, and he’s owed a ton of credit for ONO and teaching me how to run a label. Moniker put out three ONO reunion records: Albino, Diegesis, and Spooks. Spooks was the only one that happened during the time I was partners with Robert, but I was still learning the ropes at that point, and also living in motels in Miami. Ha ha. The first time I played in ONO was for three New York gigs in Spring 2016 while I was still in Miami. Awesome shows. We played Alphaville, a WFMU live set, and a show at the late venue Palisades. I played guitar and added a little bit of voice, and I remember after playing the first gig, I told someone, “This is the most fun thing I’ve ever done.” It was a signpost of the direction my life would take afterwards. I had never toured before, had barely played gigs before. I never had even thought of myself really as a musician. I have a deep, deep case of imposter syndrome. Ha ha.

How did the relationship with ONO continue? 

JR: When I moved back to Chicago at the end of 2017, I hit up P Michael and was like, “Yo, now that I’m back in Chicago, can I play in the band full time?” I had been doing an all-vocal industrial project called Reverent back then, and when travis and P had seen me, they freaked. I was wearing a full body fishnet suit, wearing lipstick, singing the devil’s music; crossing over in some key places with ONO. We all three have pretty fucked up relationships with religion, and it’s pretty apparent if you talk to us for more than a handful of minutes, but we also all love blues, gospel, and spiritual traditions. We also all have the same favorite book, I think - Dhalgren by Samuel R Delany.

And you ended up releasing their newest record Red Summer on American Dreams?

JR: Red Summer has been finished for a year and a half at this point, but has been in the works for many, many more. We sent it around to a bunch of labels, but we were having difficulty getting any sort of decisive answer about it. Some were booked, others kind of led us on, etc. This routine became less and less fun, and I started getting more and more annoyed. Eventually I just started talking to the ONO crew like “I know how to do this. If we do it with my label, we’ll have complete control over all the artistic process, and it’ll be on our timeline and say-so,” which is important for a piece of work like this. I hired my good friend Jake Saunders at Clandestine to help with publicity as I knew that I couldn’t do as good a job publicizing as the music and art deserved, and he’s been an absolute dream to work with. I couldn’t thank him more.
The whole record has been a dream come true. I couldn’t be happier with how it’s been received, and I think once all of the insanity from COVID-19 starts to settle down, the insanity of ONO in a live form will be more pronounced than ever!

What draws you to industrial and experimental artists? A form of music that turns off so many people.

JR: I’ve been into creatures and monsters since I was a kid. I used to create these journals of creatures and environments with imaginary wildlife in them, and sometimes I would cut them out, and fold them so that they would stand up on top of a paper-made natural world. I would spend my days imagining all kinds of animals and monsters. I saw Tremors when I was ten or eleven and that got me obsessed with monster movies. I was terrified by the violence, I had been raised in a very sheltered environment, but I couldn’t look away! The alien creatures, the tense situations. It was obsession-inducing! Being drawn to this material was indicative of how my life would shape out. I got into anime, comic books, samurai movies, and horror very easily; and despite my mom raiding my room on a regular basis and trashing all the DVDs and comic books I had painfully collected that didn’t fit into God’s plan, I couldn’t get enough of them. There is an irony that perhaps because she was so adamant that these things brought me closer to the devil I became more invested in them. It’s kind of hilarious looking back - she did this even when I was in college. As long as I kept the comic books like Lucifer or Transmetropolitan or Preacher outside the house, she wouldn’t throw them away, but if they entered the house, even when I would be like 22, they were liable to end up in the trash heap.
I think industrial music is a continuation of that for me. Most industrial heads are into monsters and horror movies and comic books. All the different ways to interact with subcultures and niche artistry overlap when you dilute them to their cores. If you ever read The Industrial Culture Handbook, basically every artist interviewed talks about horror movies, JG Ballard, postmodernism, etc.; and that’s because I think it attracts a specific kind of person. Someone unafraid by, even allured by, the darkness. Most industrial music is cartoonish, hackneyed, and overwrought, often verging on cosplay. So are horror movies! So are comic books! They’re still very fun to imbibe.

What about the Experimental vein?

JR: Experimental music is harder to pin down. I suppose I just like the lack of rules and the open-ended creativity in experimental music. There are tons of people who take it VERY seriously, and that’s kind of a cosplay-esque attitude as well. The reality is that few people pay any attention to the art we make, which is kind of liberating on one hand and annoying on the “trying to get paid” other hand. It does make the attempts to justify and aggrandize the music more hilarious to me. Music as a whole is more fun with a sense of humor.