Ella goes under the alias “Cleo Reed,” modelled after two ancestors. Born and raised in NYC and Uptown DC, Cleo has been learning and experiencing under the musical influence of black underground sounds from traditions in hip-hop to experimental R&B/Soul. After three years with Pretty Sick, an All-Girl Dream Punk Band, Cleo has launched her solo career with an intention to bend genre, perform, and amplify the needed presence of black queer women in production and sound design spaces. Cleo’s sound has provided a multitude of performances, from 2019’s  “The Motherlode” with NPR Music x Lincoln Center to Adidas’s Open Mic Competition with Pusha T, Sporting Life, and Hot97 @ SoB’s. As Cleo finishes the mixing and mastering of her first EP, “Root Cause,” she works a day job and attends her final year at Berklee College of Music for a degree in Electronic Production and Design. After completion, she intends to use her creative lens to release her music as an artist as well as produce/curate for other artists and commercial work such as film/TV. 

 

Cleo breathes musicianship and creativity into everything she touches. Her music bends genres through the use of guitar, vocal harmonies and synth soundscapes informed by the origins of electronic music in the black underground. After winning the Adidas Sound Labs competition in 2018 in collaboration with Pusha T and Kamp Grizzly, Cleo has collaborated with a plethora of underground New York artists, including: Nick Hakim, Wiki, Caleb Giles, Slauson Malone, Earth Dad, Duendita and many more.