We’ve been eagerly anticipating the release of First Sounds, the debut collaborative album that pairs three of Montreal’s finest musicians, composer and violinist Sarah Neufeld, multi-instrumentalist and musical polymath Richard Reed Parry and cellist and composer Rebecca Foon. The album will see the light of day on November 1st through Envision Records in North America and One Little Independent in the UK and the rest of the world, and the trio had already shared the utterly engrossing and otherworldly ‘Maria’ and ‘Slow New Year’, the spellbinding piece that sprouted the album. They are enticing us again with new single ‘Circular’, a track about “plaintive ghosts”, as Neufeld describes. She continues, “Three rivers of subconscious thought weaving through one another, picking up and leaving off, through a dense fog and the long reeds. We search for hidden answers in the muck and the morning air. Bows gently scrape strings, round and round and round”.
‘Circular’ is offered with a video made by Jason Last and you can watch it now.
Last month we were excited to hear about First Sounds, the upcoming collaborative album from three of Montreal’s finest musicians – composer and violinist Sarah Neufeld, multi-instrumentalist and musical polymath Richard Reed Parry and cellist and composer Rebecca Foon. Following the utterly engrossing, otherworldly and beautiful first single, ‘Maria’, the trio have now unveiled ‘Slow New Year’, the spellbinding piece that sprouted the album. The single is offered with accompanying visuals and you can watch it below.
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.”
With a sublime new album, Waxing Moon, released last week, Rebecca Foon has unveiled a stunning accompanying video for the album track ‘Vessels’, featuring Patrick Watson. The video was directed by Stephanie Weber Biron and the wonderful cellist and composer penned her thoughts about it:
“Stephanie Weber Biron created a beautiful visual tale to “Vessels”, capturing interweaving themes of love, loss, memories, transcendence and how the spirit, imaginative world can feel more real at times than physical reality. Featuring Sasha Korbut and Karine Plantadit, the dancers gracefully get lost in each other and the natural landscape around them, taking us on a beautiful path into an ethereal plane. The narrative is both meditative and otherworldy, leaving you grappling with the interconnection of our past, present and future realities and reflecting on those that have been here and those to come.”
Watch the video below.
Waxing Moon is out now through Constellation and all its royalties will be donated to Pathway To Paris and its “1000 Cities” Green Transition initiative in collaboration with the United Nations.
Rebecca Foon announced a new album last month, Waxing Moon, marking the first under her own name, and also the first with piano and vocals taking centre stage. Deeply influenced by the climate crisis, the upcoming album “finds her writing and singing her most arrestingly direct yet poetic words”, describes the press release, “tapping universal and personal heartbreak in both despair and hope”. She offered a few words about it:
“This album is by far the most raw record I have ever made, and the most direct channeling of emotions I have ever put into music. We are in a time of enormous sadness and fear as humanity and all sentient beings are faced with incredible unknowns about our collective future. This album channels my love for our beautiful world and the personal heartbreak I have experienced over the last couple of years in my own life, amidst despair over our dying planet facing mass extinction. Making this music was a way for me to communicate on some level the interplay between the micro/macro, the exchange between trying to live in each precious moment while navigating the beauty, chaos and pain of being alive together, the spirit world that surrounds us and how it can touch us in the most unanticipated magical ways, and the human struggle of how to truly make a positive impact in these dire times – with all the hope and loss of hope that comes with it. Making this music has saved me on so many levels, and I hope it can provide some connection to another realm for a moment as it did for me. I am so grateful. With love and hope for a renewable, equitable and just world. xoxo”
The album news came paired with the gorgeous and compelling track ‘Ocean Song’ and the enchanting and brilliant composer and musician is enticing us again with another striking beauty of a song called ‘Dreams To Be Born’. Take a listen now.
Waxing Moon is out on February 21st through Constellation and all its royalties will be donated to Pathway To Paris (of which she is a co-founder) and its “1000 Cities” Green Transition initiative in collaboration with the United Nations.
We love Rebecca Foon, the enchanting and brilliant Montreal based cellist and composer who has been shining in a variety of projects over the years. In addition to her solo project, Saltland, Foon is a founding member of Esmerine and a former member of Thee Silver Mt. Zion and Set Fire To Flames, amongst many other projects and collaborations. There’s new music on the way from her, this time under her own name. And to top the good news off, Foon has unveiled a new track, ‘Ocean Song’, where the piano and vocals take centre stage. She comments:
“Over the last year I have been sitting at the piano writing songs and accessing a part of myself I have never known…composing on an unfamiliar instrument and plunging deeper into singing. As I observe our beautiful world and the overwhelmingly heartbreaking state we collectively find ourselves in, while also going through my own personal roller coaster of life these past couple of years, the precious moments I’ve been so privileged to carve out for music have been more meaningful than ever. I just finished a new album, there’s still cello on it too, but these new songs feel like a new chapter. So I’m setting Saltland aside for now, and I’ll be releasing this new record under my own name. More news about that coming soon. In the meantime I’m excited to share one of these new tracks. It’s called Ocean Song. Hear the whole song via link in bio. So much love to Richard Reed Parry and Mishka Stein for their magic on this song.”
‘Ocean Song’ is a gorgeous and compelling track. Listen to it below.
