Takiaya Reed: “I’ve built a whole entire world in my dreams”

Now the sole full-time member of the instrumental project Divide and Dissolve, on her latest album, Insatiable, Takiaya Reed is channelling her low-end catharsis into a powerful message of profound love and resistance

“Dreams are so important. They’re life-affirming. I remember when I was a kid, I didn’t realise it was called lucid dreaming, but I lucid dreamed a lot – basically every day,” says Takiaya Reed. 

Reed is in a hotel room in New Orleans, minimally adorned with white walls and white bed linen, when she tells me she’s able to compose music in her dreams. She landed in the city a few days ago to take some time out before a season of touring starting in May, but keeps being woken by the sounds of marching bands filtering through the room’s floor-to-ceiling windows. When her sleep isn’t being interrupted, dreams are vital to her creative process. “I’ve built a whole entire world in my dreams,” she says, explaining how she’s able to test out melodies while dreaming, which she immediately sings into a voice memo on her phone when she wakes up.

Even over a slightly glitchy Zoom connection, there’s a palpable warmth to Reed’s presence. She’s relaxed, softly spoken and laughs frequently, yet also has the demeanour of someone who is fully in tune with herself and her creative vision. Over most of the past decade, she’s been the lead instrumentalist – she plays guitar, saxophone and synths – in Divide and Dissolve, a band of ferocious intensity. Their deployment of low frequencies, sludgy guitar riffs and mind-melting volumes through enormous racks of guitar amps is destabilising and overpowering – precisely as it’s designed to be. 

Divide and Dissolve formed while Reed was living in Melbourne, where she settled after many years on the road as a travelling musician, never having felt she fully belonged in her home state of Texas. There she met drummer Sylvie Nehill. Reed, who is of African-American and Cherokee heritage, and Nehill, of European-Australian and Māori descent, bonded over their shared Indigenous identity, affinity for darker sounds and concern for issues of Indigenous sovereignty. Their music has always been imbued with a fierce anti-colonial and anti-racist politics, and a disillusionment with the American empire – particularly in the wake of the first Trump presidency in 2016. Nehill has since left the band, but Reed has continued the project with a rotating line-up of drummers. 

Having bounced between cities since her teens, I ask her where she considers home now. “I guess I’m just leaving that open,” she says with a grin. “Honestly, I spend most of my time in London.” When I ask which neighbourhood she hangs out in, she bursts out laughing. “Leytonstone,” she says, beaming about the north-east London suburb. “I love it out there. It’s great. I fell in love with someone who lives there, and I was like, ‘This place rules.’”

Though London might be her de facto home for now, the ideas for her new album, Insatiable, took shape in Berlin, where she approached friend and sound engineer Nicholas Wilbur with a set of saxophone loops she had recorded. Those loops were later layered with Reed’s signature brutal guitar riffs, and the whole album came together in just a few days. Like previous Divide and Dissolve albums, such as Systemic, released in 2023, and Gas Lit, which came out two years earlier, Insatiable is entirely instrumental, and not an easy listen: full of roaring, distortion-ravaged guitar, chest-crushing percussion and composed almost entirely in minor keys. Its bleak track names – which include Hegemonic, Monolithic, Grief and Death Cult – call to mind overwhelming and unrelenting forces. But from within the darkness, there’s light, particularly in the form of Reed’s undulating saxophone melodies, which provide a subtle counterpoint to the aggression of the guitar and drums.

Though the piano was the first instrument Reed learnt as a child, she soon felt more drawn to the saxophone, and it remains the instrument she feels most at home with. I ask her if part of its appeal is that it’s intrinsically linked to the breath. “It’s life-affirming,” she says. “In order to live, you must breathe. In order to breathe, you must be living.” This philosophy means that, in Reed’s hands, the saxophone becomes a powerful tool for individual and collective transformation. “It’s the instrument that anything I dream about playing, I can play immediately, and it feels like an extension of me,” she says. “I can be in the depths of exhaustion, you can put me through absolutely anything, and I can play saxophone perfectly. It’s something that’s indestructible inside of me.” 

With this intuitive and meditative approach to playing music, she’s always been drawn to lower frequencies. “I taught myself how to play guitar,” Reed explains. “And when I started playing, that’s what was coming out. It was all really heavy, slow and low. I was like, this is the music that my soul is gravitating towards. And I am in acceptance of that.” 

Consequently, labels like ‘doom’ or ‘metal’, which have often been associated with Reed’s music, are largely incidental to her identity. “I think those labels are interesting because they’re really helpful for other people,” she says. “I’m not offended at all. I’m just like, ‘Oh, that’s lovely. What a lovely place to be.’” She jokes about the nerdy camaraderie she shares with musicians in similar bands. “‘We like the same pickups. I like your guitar strings. I like your guitar. I like my amps more,’” she says with a chuckle. 

What is far more significant in Divide and Dissolve’s approach is the destabilising effect of low frequencies – both on the human body and in relation to oppressive systems of power, be they colonialism or white supremacy. “People use [music] to go to war,” she explains. “They use it as literal roadmaps to escape slavery. They use it to create liberation and freedom when that feeling doesn’t feel close. Music creates spaciousness, distance and openness. That is the function of this language and this communication style. It’s gorgeous and it’s very powerful, and you don’t know who’s going to be impacted.”

This need to confront powerful and negative forces also manifests in some of Reed’s other creative projects. Early in 2025, she composed a symphony that was performed with the BBC Concert Orchestra as part of BBC Radio Three’s Unclassified Live series. The movements were based on riffs and motifs from Insatiable, expanded into vast, sweeping compositions that revealed the full scope of Reed’s abilities. The melancholic saxophone loops from Loneliness, for example, are transformed by the orchestra into something far grander and more majestic. 

As a classically trained musician, composing in this way felt like a natural step for her. “It was cool to be able to express many ideas at the same time – for it to be played on so many different instruments.” She’s already got ideas swirling around for her second symphony. “I would like to do it again, and I’m going to figure out how, because it feels like very important work. I feel uncomfortable that there’s not enough people involved [in classical music] who look like me. So, I will just continue to make more contributions in that realm.”

With this constant concern for confronting injustice and power imbalances, I ask if the current state of geopolitics – including the authoritarian turn of the Trump administration and the ongoing genocide in Gaza – has spurred a sense of urgency. Her response is one of calm resolve: “I feel consistent. I feel steadfast. I haven’t changed. There are some things that must change in order for us to continue to live, and I believe in this so deeply.” 

Despite the extreme heaviness of Divide and Dissolve’s music, Reed insists that it all comes back to love and a determination to summon less brutal realities. “Talking about dismantling the colonial project – a project that necessitates the death of certain peoples in order for other peoples to be uplifted – that’s what the music is about,” she says. “It’s about deep, profound love and joy, while talking about all these other experiences. So yeah, I feel really chill. My life’s dedicated to this. That’s what I’ve chosen, and I’m really good with it.”