Sarah Neufeld, Richard Reed Parry, and Rebecca Foon have had intersecting creative paths for several decades already. These three well-known musicians from Montreal have founded a chamber music trio, and at “Liepāja Art Forum 2026” the audience will have the chance to experience their first performance in Latvia.
Multi-instrumentalist Richard Reed Parry and violinist Sarah Neufeld are best known to listeners as members, songwriters, and performers of the Grammy-winning rock band Arcade Fire. The two also play in Bell Orchestre. Many also know Rebecca Foon as one of the loudest voices of Montreal’s independent music scene, as she is the co-founder of the acclaimed chamber post-rock ensemble Esmerine and a member of Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra, Set Fire To Flames, and several others. Latvian listeners also know her solo project Saltland. Together, the trio represents one of the most interesting music scenes of the past decades, the so-called Montreal scene, where for many people as inspiration the borders between popular, serious, and unrestrained music, stadium-scale grandeur, and miniature, dark basement clubs merge and fade away.
The upcoming concert invites the audience into an atmospheric sound world, which the trio has tried to capture as if in a nutshell on their debut album First Sounds.
“It is like watching our own early years repeated, the places where we used to hang out together, the people we knew, while at the same time living in the present,” the trio says of their “first sounds.”
The album was a careful and deeply personal work spanning three years, and was released in 2024. The musicians recorded it in a wooden church in upstate New York. Its creation was largely inspired by the intimate and often boundary-defying chamber music with which all three musicians grew up.
On the tracks of First Sounds, violin, cello, double bass, a little bit of vocals, guitars, and electronics weave a fabric of neoclassically beautiful, rough dissonant, and cinematically tense threads. At times, the lean recording resembles the soundtrack to an as-yet-unfilmed psychological thriller, but at the same time it also surrounds listeners in a meditative, light-filled experience in which the personal becomes collective, or vice versa. But not necessarily.
