I · Beginnings
A cassette, a Casio
Reza’s love of music started at five, when an aunt gave him a Barry White cassette. He played it until he knew every arrangement on it: the silky vocal, the sweeping strings, the syncopation, the snare, right down to the cowbell. By his next birthday he had moved on to Michael Jackson, but by then it was Quincy Jones’s production he was listening to, and Quincy Jones he wanted to be.
A lifelong devotion to Prince followed, and with it his first songs, written on a Casio keyboard. As a teenager in the UK he was making four-track demos and absorbing everything at once: Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder and David Bowie; Run-DMC and N.W.A; Beethoven and Bach; Miles Davis and Jimi Hendrix.
II · Two educations
Schubert and Aphex Twin
Over time two influences took hold: Romantic-era classical music, from Debussy and Satie to Schubert’s impromptus, and electronic and ambient music, including Aphex Twin’s way of pushing a synthesiser to its limits. Underneath both sat the soul, hip-hop and rock of his childhood.
Before film, Reza worked as a songwriter, record producer and engineer across pop and the underground. He worked with artists including Dr. Dre, Kylie Minogue, Britney Spears and the UK rapper Akala, and toured with Destiny’s Child.
III · Scoring
Music that serves the image
His scores fuse orchestra with contemporary production, and treat soundscape as seriously as harmony. His screen work includes the Nicolas Cage and Elijah Wood thriller The Trust, Mercy, adapted from a Stephen King story, and the Starz drama P-Valley.
With H. Scott Salinas he scored Warrior, the period martial-arts series drawn from the writings of Bruce Lee and produced by Justin Lin. The show brought together two of Reza’s lifelong interests: music and the martial arts.
IV · Yin and Yang
Two albums, one balance
A longtime yoga practitioner with a deep interest in Daoism and Eastern philosophy, Reza made his own records as a pair. Yin (2021) is post-classical, for piano and cello with glimpses of electronic texture. Yang (2021) is electronic, threaded with live piano and cellos. Together they explore balance: the feminine and masculine energies he sees in everyone.
Both were first performed at sunset on the Robot Heart bus at the Renegade Burn. To play the piano parts live with the same sound he had recorded, Reza sampled his 1957 Steinway at different velocities and built it into a playable instrument. That set premiered on a Mixmag livestream from a hilltop in Los Angeles.
V · Now
One over infinity
In 2022 Reza launched his own imprint, Music and Texture, with Super Flu’s re-interpretation of Funkbible. Since spring 2026 he has released a run of singles, from I Feel U and Vapor to Nostalgia and Stardusted Girl, most with videos he co-directed, on the way to a new album.
The idea underneath the new work is the one that names his podcast: that we are one consciousness, and at the same time endlessly fractured into individual experience. On 1/∞, the Spiritual Arts Podcast, he sits down with artists from every discipline to ask how their spiritual practice feeds what they make.
