Premiere: Ethan Reed's 'Time Is A Language I Never Learned To Speak'

4 September 2017 | 4:32 pm | Staff Writer
Originally Appeared In

The Perth-based producer and composer has a new music video out, just in time for the release of his debut record.

The Perth-based producer and composer has a new music video out, just in time for the release of his debut record. 



After five years experience of playing in local bands, Western Australian musician Ethan Reed has cast off the full band shackles and will very soon be taking his first ever venture into the realm of a solo artist. The first key milestone in this new path will be his debut album, 'Coherent Thought', which releases tomorrow, September 5th.

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'Coherent Thought' is an instrumental, ambient, post-rock-flavored reworking of 'I'd Rather Forget', the debut full-length from spoken word/emo band Treehouses, who Reed also plays guitar and bass in. Recorded, mixed, and mastered by Reed himself, each of this new release's ten songs delicately and suitably re-crafts that previous band's original works from their 2014 album; all resulting in an emotional, deeply contemplative instrumental experience that showcases Reed's solidly developing song writing and production skills, while also retaining that Treehouses' record's vulnerability.

The visual accompaniment for the LP's first single, 'Biting Chipped Nails', was created by simply using footage found on an old family video tape; a first of a series that will accompany this album's release, and one that showed Reed putting his family's past and his childhood out to the world so openly alongside his latest work. The next step in that personal process comes with our premiere today of the record's second single, the layered and dynamic epic, 'Time Is A Language I Never Learned To Speak', which you can see below.

Whereas 'Biting Chipped Nails' showed footage from 1998 of Reed as a young boy visiting the Twelve Apostles along the Great Ocean Road in Victoria with his family, the music video for the longer piece of 'Time Is A Language I Never Learned To Speak' sees old family footage filmed by his father while they visited The John F. Kennedy Space Centre in Florida, America in 1999. The first-person footage of an eerily empty control room featuring multiple on-repeat grainy video-screens showing past space shuttles launches is built up so well by the song's distant drones, warm low-end, tonally clean ambient guitars, and its minimal drumming.

However, the true high-point of the track arrives in the song's middle eight where droning, feedback-ridden guitars washed in massive amounts of reverb cascade with crashing drums and cymbals cascade over the listener to the on-screen visuals of rocket engines firing and a shuttle ascending from the Earth up to the heavens. This home-video footage showing off one of the man's greatest yet most imposing technological achievements of the 20th century is then so intimately contrasted by a soothing, restrained back half of dancing melodic guitars that provide the sound bed for home footage of Reed playing with his brother and father somewhere out in country Victoria.

Simpy put, 'Time Is A Language I Never Learned To Speak' a gorgeous and touching composition; both in terms of this track's mammoth sonics and the homey visuals that accompany it.

Pick up Ethan Reed's beautifully warm and heartfelt debut record, 'Coherent Thought', here for only $4 when it drops tomorrow.



Check out another cut from Reed's new record, 'The Days Are Bleeding', over here. Also, Treehouses will have something new coming in the next week or so...