Sarah Neufeld, Richard Reed Parry and Rebecca Foon have detailed a new album. The neoclassical trio will share First Sounds on November 1 via Envision Records / One Little Independent.
While each of the members have crossed paths over the years — Neufeld and Perry as Bell Orchestre co-founders, Foon as co-founder of Esmerine and a member of Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra and Set Fire to Flames — the nine-track First Sounds marks their first collaboration as equal partners.
Perry recalls in a release, "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.
"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."
"Maria" is the first of those compositions to arrive, and you can hear it below alongside a video shot by Jason Last.
Last shares of his visuals, "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."
First Sounds was produced by Shahzad Ismaily, who also plays percussion on "Maria."
First Sounds:
1. Slow New Year
2. Duelling Flutters
3. Maria
4. Rosa Canina
5. Day Three
6. Clouding Clouds
7. First Sound
8. Circular
9. Georgia