Richard Reed Parry and violinist Sarah Neufeld are best known to audiences as members, authors and performers in the Grammy-winning rock band Arcade Fire. They both also play in Bell Orchestre. Rebecca Foon is recognized by many as one of the loudest indie voices of Montreal – she is the co-founder of the renowned chamber post-rock ensemble Esmerine, member of Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra, Set Fire to Flames, and several other collectives. Latvian audiences are also familiar with her solo project, Saltland. Together, the trio represent one of the most fascinating music environments of the last decades, the so-called Montreal scene, that inspires many with the merging and breaking of boundaries between popular, serious and untamed music, stadium scales and dark, intimate underground clubs.

The upcoming concert invites the audience into a world of atmospheric sounds that the trio captured in their debut album, First Sounds.

The trio describe their first sounds: ‘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.’

The album, released in 2024, is the result of more than three years of meticulous and deeply personal work. The artists recorded it in a wooden church in upstate New York. The music was largely inspired by the intimate and often borderless genre of chamber music, with which all three musicians grew up.

In the tracks of First Sounds, the violin, cello, double bass, minimal vocals, guitars, and electronics weave a tapestry using strands of neoclassical beauty, raw dissonance, and cinematic suspense. The impressive record often reminds of a soundtrack to a psychological thriller that has not yet been made, but at the same time it wraps its listener in a meditative and luminous experience, where the personal can become collective, and vice versa. But nothing is ever forced.



Artists:
Sarah Neufeld – violin
Richard Reed Parry – double bass
Rebecca Foon – cello