It's a typical winter day in London: cold and grey with the damp doing its best to seep into your bones. Nonetheless, Takiaya Reed is beaming. As the driving force behind anti-colonial doom/drone behemoth Divide And Dissolve, she’s been delivering chest-crumpling heaviness and flights of unbridled joy for the best part of a decade.
Beyond being a formidable riff-wielder, though, she’s also a classically trained saxophonist – one who’s currently putting the finishing touches to her first symphony for the BBC Concert Orchestra. “My entire life I have wanted to write a symphony, and now… I have,” she smiles.
We catch up while she takes a break from composition, feeling somewhat guilty for breaking her concentration. “It’s something I felt called to do,” she explains. “I am so excited to do it again – now I just want to write symphony number two, because I’m learning so much and there are things that I would love to do differently next time. I hope there is a next time.”
Takiaya is crackling with excitement, and her enthusiasm is absolutely infectious. She was contacted, seemingly out of the blue, to take part in BBC Radio 3’s Unclassified Live, an ambitious event that sees three outlier artists commissioned to compose or reinterpret music for performance at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall.
“They’re so amenable to helping you achieve what you want to achieve,” she says. “They didn’t have a choir and I asked for a choir. Because my music is so low and heavy, I asked for a tuba… and I got a tuba.”
The headcount tops out at around 60 world-class musicians, what with the orchestra, choir, tuba, conductor and Takiaya herself on soprano sax.
“I’ve got all of this to work with and it’s awesome,” she says delightedly. “When I’m composing for Divide And Dissolve I hear all these instruments anyways, I’m just condensing it down for two people. Here, I was given the opportunity to be more expansive.”
While many would be daunted by the prospect of a blank sheet of paper and a 60-strong orchestra to wrangle, Takiaya is clearly in her element. To bring her vision to life, she’s been working with arranger Fiona Brice (also a solo artist and session musician, who has worked with the likes of Placebo and Beyoncé) to pare back her four-movement composition from its initial, maximalist incarnation to something leaner, where the energy is more powerfully focused. The process has been rapid, with Takiaya spending much of her downtime on tour writing and ruminating, gathering her ideas in order to meet the project’s stringent deadlines.
“I’m not sure if it’s my preference to write under pressure, but everyone involved needs time,” she explains. “I write quickly, though, and when you are working with a brilliant arranger like Fiona, the process moves faster than if I was writing all the parts down by myself. And something different would’ve happened if I’d had a lot of time, so I’m happy that it moved quickly because I needed it to. I had something to get out, and it’s there now.”
Takiaya isn’t exaggerating when she says she writes quickly. As well as penning the symphony for the BBC, she has two new albums in the bag.
“I was staying in Berlin for a couple of months,” she says. “I have a friend there who’s an incredible musician, and she invited me to stay at her studio to write and record. I wrote a brand new Divide And Dissolve album. Then, we got in the studio in January last year and I started writing new music. I just felt compelled to write a brand new album on the spot.”
This second album was named Insatiable, fittingly enough, and it will be Divide And Dissolve’s first release for their new label, Bella Union. Although it was written and recorded months before the symphony was on the table, there are certain threads that connect them.
“I feel like they’re indistinguishable in a way,” says Takiaya. “There are certain moments from Insatiable that are being transposed, or rather, being infused into the symphony. But they’re being expressed differently because there are so many voices.”
In many ways this duality sums Divide And Dissolve up nicely. The band effortlessly combine heaviness, beauty, rage and hope in a manner that suits sticky-floored rock clubs full of metalheads in Black Sabbath shirts as well as arts spaces or concert halls.
“I do appreciate that it transcends genre,” laughs Takiaya. “I feel like it’s something that happens personally, as well. People look at me and they get something that’s different to what they expected. And it’s represented in the people I’m friends with. I’ll have parties at my house, and people are like, ‘Takiaya’s having a party… we’re about to meet people we’ve never met before!’”
Divide And Dissolve's Insatiable is out April 18 via Bella Union.
