Justin Randel is Reaches, an artist exploring the potentialities and possibilities for twisting the electronic communalism of dance music through his own framework of introspective, soul-searching lyricism and songcraft.  His second record, Wherever the Internet Goes, Sorrow Follows, out _____ continues his investigation of the voice and vision of the project, following up on his record I Am Alive and Well.

Randel’s a born road dog, traveling and performing under both his Reaches project and other various monikers over the past decade, spanning three continents and 19 countries in the last few years.  He’s the kind of performer who comes off tour talking about his next jaunt, and those years traveling have left him with an impressively deep catalog of stories, names and places from which his work emerges. Trained in music composition, Randel was equally informed by years trawling through online music boards, blogs and P2P networks, culling together a taste that spans global pop, electronic composition and sonic experimentation in equal measure, and which finds its natural expression in his releases.  

This expansive sense of the disparate threads and thoughts of the global underground find a cohesive point of exchange in Randel’s work, as if his songs sought to pull together the disparate communities, the faces and zones that he has lived and worked in over the years into a more communal space. Wherever the Internet Goes, Sorrow Follows sits at a precise juncture of psych-tinged song craft and dancefloor-oriented productions that speak to his time in the midwest hotbed of Chicago.  Switching between, lurching, deconcstructed approaches on tracks like “Two Particle Beams Collided” and more anthemic, direct work on pieces like “GCI.”

The record has a slack, slithering production style, mixing dense sonics with a direct, wide-eyed delivery that relies on Randel’s deep crooning vocals.  The work immediately recalls the vocal stylings and lyrical content of classic New Romantics records, but in the artist’s long relationship and close friendships within the Midwestern dance music communities equally see him exploring more mesmerizing, meditative textures and spaces.   

It’s a testament to his ability as a songwriter that these pieces could almost find a home in any of the environments described above, whether a basement rave in Eastern Europe, a loft party in Brooklyn, or anywhere else, a series of tracks sent out like love letters to the worlds he’s passed through and shared.  As a result, the record itself feels full of the tragedies and triumphs of the world around him, friends lost and found, and the shared spirit of creativity, of building a world for themselves, that unifies them.

Free music e-zine heading towards 18,000 posts these days.

GCI

reaches