Sarah Neufeld, Richard Reed Parry & Rebecca Foon Improvise ‘First Sounds’—An Album 25 Years in the Making

By Megan Westberg | From the January/February 2025 issue of Strings

Violinist Sarah Neufeld and cellist Rebecca Foon first met as teenagers at an Ani DiFranco concert. This seems a good place to start, as any discussion of their new album, First Sounds (Envision Records)—on which Neufeld and Foon combine talents with those of multi-instrumentalist Richard Reed Parry—really has to start in the late ’90s, when this trio initially came together. The relationships, you see, came first in the origin story of this project and are inextricably central to it. 

“We’re very close friends and colleagues in many different ways,” says Neufeld to Foon, “but on paper it looks like I’m your little shadow.” The two are speaking to me about the new album over Zoom, and we’re starting at the beginning: how the trio met and why they work so well together. Neufeld explains further: “I basically followed Rebecca to Montreal because it seemed like the music that she was getting involved with was cooler than the music that I was involved with.” They both laugh. “Cooler in a way that was meaningful,” she adds. “I didn’t just want to be cool. It wasn’t about that. But it actually sounded interesting.”

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Foon had come to the cello fairly late (by string playing standards at any rate), joining her public elementary school string program in Vancouver, Canada, at age eight. She didn’t come from a musical family but had fallen in love with the cello at school, watching older kids carry them around and play. She later found a teacher at the Vancouver Academy of Music who retooled her technique. “She had to completely retrain me,” says Foon. 

Neufeld came from a very small town on Vancouver Island that also had a public school string program, but her interest in violin wasn’t born there. “I was lucky because there was a Suzuki teacher in town, and my family was musical, not to an extreme degree, but musical enough to know what that was and to think that it was good for kids.” She started lessons on the early side, possibly with a touch of competitive spirit, as her older brother played as well. Eventually she, too, graduated to a “bigger-town teacher.” 

“But then,” she says, “I quit.”

By which she means that she started playing guitar in bands and singing and writing songs, “just trying to find a different voice with music.” She also never stopped playing the violin. So yes, she quit. But not really. It might be more faithful to say she quit studying classical music, which, at the time, was a dramatic move. Foon did not quit and remembers a musical world with strict boundaries. “You were kind of rebellious to move out of the classical world if you played violin, cello, or viola just because the classical world is so intense, you know, and if you moved out of it, your classical education teachers were like, ‘That’s not real music.’ It’s more accepted now. At the time, there was a kind of stigma around it.”

Neufeld’s leap into other styles, Foon contends, made her an inspiration. “Sarah was the first musician I’d ever met, especially with a stringed instrument, who was so multifaceted and expansive on the instrument in terms of classical and mastering technique, but she was also able to improvise, go into other territories of genres of music, and also compose. So I was very drawn to play with her in terms of pushing myself outside of what I knew from the classical world, because I had a lot of guilt actually around leaving the classical world.”

Foon moved to Montreal to study music and gender studies at McGill University. Neufeld, as she mentioned, followed. “I went to Concordia to study jazz improvisation and other stuff just because it felt looser,” says Neufeld. “I had quit classical, and they wouldn’t let me do anything but classical at McGill, so I was like, no, and so I went to Concordia. Luckily though, because I met a lot of other musical weirdos there. Firstly and foremostly Richie. On day one.” 

Thus, Richard Reed Parry, who was just picking up the bass, entered the scene and completed the trio. “Richie and I started improvising together right away because we were excited about the same things,” Neufeld says. Parry, who was self-taught, represented an entirely new set of influences. He’d never studied classical, he wasn’t studying jazz; he was more of a “rock band guy,” according to Neufeld, but she doesn’t mean rock ’n’ roll. He was more about “complicated chord structures and rhythms, and we were all really into [post-rock band] Tortoise and [avant-pop] Stereolab and the Rachel’s, which is a post-rock kind of string ensemble, with rock band instruments, based out of the Midwest of the States.” 

The three found their “glue” in this experimental, eclectic “genreless” space that encouraged the exploration of texture and atmosphere. “I think that we were all coming from slightly different edges of places that did have overlap,” says Neufeld, “and Richie harmonically is amazing at pushing anybody out of a diatonic trap because he was never stuck in it in the first place.” 

Their musical chemistry was evident from the start. “I was really happy when Sarah moved to Montreal, and we started playing music, and she had met Richie and brought us all together,” remembers Foon. “It was a real honor to be able to play with people who were from the same planet.”

And in a way, this is when First Sounds maybe should have been made. It is, at least, where it comes from. But the three have been rather busy managing successful careers. Neufeld’s and Parry’s seem to have intertwined the most often, both as members of Juno- and Grammy Award–winning indie-rock band Arcade Fire and founders of Bell Orchestre, a “collaborative instrumental group” that lists its influences as “Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, Arvo Pärt, Charles Mingus, and Talk Talk.” Foon has been a member of post-rock outfits A Silver Mt. Zion and Set Fire to Flames. In 2001, she cofounded Esmerine, a Juno Award–winning chamber rock group. She’s recorded solo material under the name Saltland (both Neufeld and Parry made guest appearances on an album), and, since 2020, under her own name. 

Through all the tours and independent projects, “we were really good friends and playing music together the whole time,” says Neufeld. So how was it that they finally found some time to record together? “It was the pandemic, and it felt like the world was ending, and I was about to have a baby, and Richie was just like, “Dudes, maybe it’s now or never.” They both laugh. “But I feel like now we turned the tap on,” she continues. “We already started making another one. The pandemic is already many years ago, but I think this is a path that we’ll continue to go down together.”

It’s a difficult album to categorize. Certainly contemporary. Certainly multifaceted and interesting and . . . warm. There’s a sense that the ensemble is leading its listeners through an experience, a series of moods perhaps, and it never abandons them in the interests of shock value. There are moments some listeners may find challenging, but there is a kind of unanimity of purpose throughout that makes those moments feel like inevitable extensions of the material that preceded them. 

It is, in short, the kind of album in which every listener will hear something entirely different. 

“Well, there’s definitely a neoclassical background because of the nature of the instrumentation,” muses Foon when I ask how she and Neufeld would describe it. “Sarah, what do you think? It definitely touches on a bunch of different genres.”

“Yeah,” she replies, “there’s some real experimental music, textural playing, which can be—if you’re not used to that kind of music—strange or ‘maybe you like it or maybe you don’t,’ but then there’s a lot of really sweet, emotionally layered harmonic and melodic development that I think will pull a lot of different listeners in the same way that maybe more cinematic new music does. There are a couple of pieces that verge on folk, where you have some recognizable chord shifts, and then the whole thing has an ambient quality about it.” 

Influences include Arvo Pärt and Erik Satie, Philip Glass, and, to bring it back 25 years to when the three were just starting to play together, the Rachel’s. Specifically, the album that came out right then, Music for Egon Schiele. 

“To be honest,” says Foon, “I don’t think there’s anyone else I know of besides Richie and Sarah that have been as impacted by that album. For me, it was like everything, that album, and I think it was the same for them. But I can’t think of anyone else that had the same connection to it.”

“Yeah,” concurs Neufeld, “other music friends got me into the Rachel’s in the late ’90s, but then I freaked out about it really hard as a violinist.”

First Sounds was recorded over the course of four or five days at Dreamland Recording Studios in New York. “Our general process is very improv-oriented,” says Neufeld. “Richie brought a handful of bass fragments [four or five], and then we just played them. We improvised with those fragments. But then the other half of the material is out of thin air. And then we would work with it a little bit. There’s not a lot of overdub. It wasn’t a big post-production situation at all.” 

This is how they work together: in the moment, “getting lost in each other’s sounds,” according to Foon. The results, affirm both Neufeld and Foon, sound nothing like any of their other projects and reveal a cohesive ensemble sound of which they are both proud. They attribute the ease with which they recorded this album to their longstanding musical friendship. 

“I think something that’s really important with musical relationships is feeling safe to f**k up and feeling safe to explore bad ideas,” says Foon. “Because when you feel safe to explore bad ideas, you can find the good ideas, you know what I mean? If you don’t feel safe to go to the bad ideas, you’re just not going deep. You’re only accessing a certain level of your subconscious creative space. So with our relationship, because there’s so much depth and history to it, we can jump into that unknown, kind-of-scary space quite easily together, which is very, very fulfilling. And I feel like the older I get, the more that having that kind of musical connection is such a treasure.”

Neufeld agrees. There’s just no time in their lives to take on anything that doesn’t feel good, she says. This album represents “a natural progression from the way we all sit around joking and having tea or whatever we do. We like being in the same room together, the three of us, and any formation of the three of us as well. We’re super connected. But I think we’ve even improved on the dynamic from the first [album] because I think we also now have the knowledge that we can make something that’s surprising and beautiful and enjoy doing it. It’s taken a space in our lives now that represents something that’s really, like Becca said, a treasure. We’re grateful for it. It’s a big deep breath.

“I think I said it was the most relaxed I’ve been in years when we recorded together the second time. It was like, oh my god, it’s a vacation for my soul.”

They’re hoping that listeners have something of the same experience listening to the album as they had making it, which Foon describes as finding a way into the space somewhere between conscious and subconscious thought, of discovering its “cool magic.” 

“It’s hard to linger in that feeling of the bridge between subconscious and conscious thought, or even existence,” says Neufeld, “so I think that if we can create even a flash of that in the listening experience, it’s pretty interesting.”