Violinist Sarah Neufeld, multi-instrumentalist Richard Reed Parry, and cellist Rebecca Foon have announced their joint debut album, First Sounds, produced by Shahzad Ismaily. The Montreal neoclassical trio unveiled the lead single “Maria” today.

“‘Maria’ is the first single from our first album, and features our friend Shahzad Ismaily on percussion,” Perry explained. “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.”

The song comes with a music video directed by Jason Last, who said the inspiration came from “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.”

“In Montreal, October 1999, the three of us played music with each other for the first time,” Parry added about the collaborative project, continuing:

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 we pursued musical collaborations, but we never recorded 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.

Watch the “Maria” video below.

TRACKLIST:
01 “Slow New Year”
02 “Duelling Flutters”
03 “Maria”
04 “Rosa Canina”
05 “Day Three”
06 “Clouding Clouds”
07 “First Sound”
08 “Circular”
09 “Georgia”

First Sounds is out 11/1 on Envision.