Sarah Neufeld / Richard Reed Parry / Rebecca Foon are a new, neoclassical trio hailing from Montreal, Quebec consisting of cellist Rebecca Foon, violinist Sarah Neufeld and multi-instrumentalist Richard Reed Parry. They have released the first single “Maria,” from their forthcoming album First Sounds produced by Shahzad Ismaily due out on November 1st on Envision Records.
The trio originally met in Montreal during the late 1990’s while independently finding their footing in the local arts and culture community. For two years, Rebecca, Sarah, and Richard collaborated in various capacities before embarking on their respective musical careers.
“In Montreal, October 1999, the three of us played music with each other for the first time, “ says Richard Reed Parry. “As we began to improvise together we felt a shared, wordless musical language emerge right away, somehow intuitive and familiar from the very start. We experimented and played together often at that time – Montreal was and still is a very creative and multi-faceted artistic hive of activity. The musical chemistry we found together was formative in each of the bands we went on to form, and we pursued musical collaborations, but we never recorded our original trio and its unique, intimate, and explorative sound. Decades of friendship and many bands later, in the heart of the first pandemic winter the three of us got together in a room and made our first album as an ensemble. Picking up exactly where we left off years earlier, we began fashioning compositions that immediately tapped into the same musical language we had discovered between us so many years earlier.”
Richard and Sarah’s musical careers have been deeply intertwined over the past twenty years. Best known for their involvement in Grammy-award-winning indie-rock group Arcade Fire (2001-present) and recently revitalized instrumental outfit and Juno-award-winning Bell Orchestre (2002-present), both musicians have spent the better part of the past two decades writing and releasing music and touring the globe.
Similarly, composer and cellist Rebecca Foon has been a fixture of the Montréal music community for two decades, performing and recording in a wide array of contexts, most notably as co-founder of the modern chamber post-rock ensemble Esmerine, as a member of Thee Silver Mt Zion Memorial Orchestra (2001-2008) and Set Fire To Flames (2001-2004), and more recently at the helm of her electro-acoustic songwriting project Saltland. With these four entities, Foon has performed around the world and released over a dozen albums on various imprints. Esmerine’s 2013 album Dalmak won the Canadian music industry’s Juno Award for Best Instrumental Album and the band’s 2015 album Lost Voices was a finalist in this same category, along with winning the award for Best Album Package.
While each member has crossed paths in different and unique ways over the years, they have never truly collaborated as equal partners. Moreover, they have always felt as though the connection they shared as a trio—both as friends and musical collaborators—was special and everlasting. And so, 25 years later, the trio is reuniting to pick up where they left off, this time with the wind at their backs.
“Maria” is the first single from our first album, and features our friend Shahzad Ismaily on percussion,” comments Richard Reed Perry. “The melody was inspired by an old handmade recording on reel-to-reel tape that came with a tape recorder I bought, it had very slowed down /half-speed voices singing hymns on it, but the recording was so slow and distorted you couldn’t really tell what they were singing. So the tune sort of felt like a hymn-like invocation.”
When asked about the video director, Jason Last commented that the inspiration came from “Recording and observing nature in Catalonia, Spain, I wanted to capture the cyclical and intricate nature of the sound through elements of light, touch, and the movement of my own body as I shot for each 5 minute take.”
First Sounds is like many before it, a product and project of the global COVID pandemic. Sarah, Richard, and Rebecca, who are normally accustomed to touring the globe, were suddenly grounded in Montreal. As a result, they started spending time together in the very place the friends initially met over two decades ago, this triggered a variety of memories— “it is as though we are watching our earlier years on replay (the places we used to hang out, the people we used to know), while simultaneously living in the present day.”
This feeling of jumping across timelines led the trio of friends to examine the various ways their lives and relationships have changed over the years and these very discussions have served as a catalyst for their creative process. Throughout our writing and production period, we weaved in and represented these central themes in our playing— through our arrangements, dynamics, and song titles.
The trio is focused on writing cinematic music with a connection to classical and orchestral music—a world they are not nearly as familiar with but are on a journey to explore.
First Sounds comes out Friday, November 01, 2024 release via Envision Records in North America, and through One Little Independent for the UK and the rest of the world.
TRACKLIST
Side A
1. Slow New Year
2. Duelling Flutters
3. Maria
Side B
4. Rosa Canina
5. Day Three
6. Clouding Clouds
Side C
7. First Sound
8. Circular
9. Georgia
