Photo: Steven Sebring

There’s wonderful news from three of Montreal’s finest musicians – boundlessly inventive composer and violinist Sarah Neufeld, incredible multi-instrumentalist and musical polymath Richard Reed Parry and enchanting and brilliant cellist and composer Rebecca Foon -, who have teamed up for a collaborative album. Longtime favourites here at CTD, the pairing of these three artists is a match made in heaven. Neufeld, Parry and Foon first met in Montreal in the late 90’s and played together then in various outfits as they found their way into the local artistic scene. They have today announced the release of their debut album, First Sounds, slated for a November 1st release through Envision Records in North America and One Little Independent in the UK and the rest of the world. Featuring nine compositions, “with dynamic minimalism, sweeping crescendos and rich harmonies”, as the press release describes, they delved deep into the cinematic realm, exploring and drawing from classical and orchestral influences.

Parry shared some insight into their collaboration:

“In Montreal, October 1999, the three of us played music with each other for the first time. 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 musical collaborations we pursued, but we never made a recording of 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.”

Alongside the album news, the trio unveiled the first single, ‘Maria’, an utterly engrossing, otherworldly and beautiful track featuring Shahzad Ismaily on percussion. Of the track, Parry said:

“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.”

‘Maria’ comes with an accompanying video directed by Jason Last, who had this to say about it:

“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. Connecting my body and the subjects that I shot.”

Watch the video below.