Sarah Belle Reid

Infrequent Seams

Times Undoing & Progress is a genre-defying electroacoustic opera by composer–performer Sarah Belle Reid that explores what happens when our sense of time begins to fracture. Blending composition, improvisation, and studio-based sound collage, the piece pushes at the boundaries of traditional opera, reimagining the form as something fluid and sonically adventurous.

“I’m interested in questioning, playing with, and reimagining what opera can be,” says Reid. “Working with extended vocal techniques, nonlinear narrative, and the intersection of acoustic and electronic instrumentation opens up so much potential for exploring different modalities of storytelling through sound.”

Across its 98-minute arc, the album unfolds as a nonlinear landscape where memory distorts, timelines overlap, and small, imperceptible shifts accumulate into irreversible change. The work traces three “caretakers” of time, each tasked with a simple role: measuring its passage, safeguarding future memories, and collecting forgotten dreams. As their routines begin to slip, the world around them subtly destabilizes. We jump between different viewpoints and temporal positions, seeing only one possible arrangement of events across time.

Composed over more than five years, the project began in 2019 as a meticulous studio practice rooted in recording, sampling, and transformation. Initial instrumental parts were drafted and recorded, then broken apart and repurposed as raw material for dense electroacoustic collages. These collages became the foundation for new layers of composition and improvisation, resulting in a recursive process of recording, re-sampling, and recomposing.

“I was living with this piece for so long that my own relationship to time started to blur into it,” says Reid. “In a way, it became a response to the fast-paced nature of the world around me. I would slow down and get lost in the details. There’s something both therapeutic and overwhelming about spending three hours on fifteen seconds of sound.”

Reid’s compositional language moves between the meticulous and the unpredictable. Driving rhythmic passages collapse into surreal collages of wind-up toys, fragmented voices, and unstable electronics; melodic lines dissolve into air, noise, and texture. Trumpets trade gestures with mechanical objects, percussion splinters into rattles and debris, and voices flicker between whisper, chant, and outburst.

“I like to think about the music as a kind of sonic surrealism,” says Reid. “Ideas transform mid-thought, and things don’t always resolve the way you expect—it can be cartoonish and playful one moment, then suddenly sincere, fragile, or intensely noisy and aggressive. I like to imagine objects transforming right before your eyes in completely impossible ways…like cracking an egg open to reveal a flower that blossoms into a miniature teapot. To me, that’s what this music sounds like.”

To realize the work’s shifting terrain, Reid assembled a cast of deeply versatile collaborators. The acclaimed experimental pop artist Julia Holter brings a vocal presence that moves seamlessly between fragile intimacy and full-bodied intensity. Multi-woodwind performer Vinny Golia (whose collaborators include John Zorn and Wadada Leo Smith) navigates an expansive instrumental palette, from contra-bass quarter-tone flute to piccolo and alto clarinet. Percussionist Tim Feeney, who has performed with Anthony Braxton, plays a makeshift drum kit assembled from planks of wood, flower pots, brake drums, and broken metal objects, creating strange but driving rhythmic environments. Instrument designer Ryan Gaston contributes electroacoustic textures using daxophone, hand-assembled circuitry, and custom-built electronic systems. Reid herself moves between quarter-tone flugelhorn, trumpet, extended techniques, and electronic processing, shaping a hybrid instrumental voice that refuses to sit still.

While the structure of Times Undoing & Progress is abstract, many of its materials are drawn from tangible, lived experiences. In several sections, Reid incorporates fragments of dreams, memories, and spoken text submitted by friends, family, and members of her Patreon community. These recordings are layered, processed, and reassembled into dense vocal environments using a custom Max/MSP patch created by Ryan Gaston.

“When you open a piece up to other people’s stories, memories, and dreams, it starts to take on a life of its own,” Reid explains. “It becomes more co-creative, and you’re no longer fully in control. For me, that unpredictability is what makes it so interesting.”

At times ominous and disorienting, at others playful and sharply humorous, Times Undoing & Progress resists settling into a single emotional register. It invites listeners to navigate their own path through an unfolding, unstable world where time is less a fixed structure than something continually reshaped through perception, memory, and attention. A live iteration of the work is currently in development for 2028, translating the piece into a spatial, site-responsive performance environment.