EVER THE EXPLORER
Arcade Fire’s Richard Reed Parry charts new territory with his latest effort
When I started it, I wasn’t even working on a project. With Arcade Fire taking off the way it did, I didn’t have a second to myself.
When Richard Reed Parry travelled the world last year with Arcade Fire, he often thought of ways to secretly escape.
The plan was to leave his Montreal bandmates behind, jump into a rented car and trek into nature where nobody could find him. There, he would meditate in the wilderness with a 360-degree video camera in tow, hoping to capture a sliver of the beautiful and strange environments often miles outside cities.
“Basically I would hide from the band and my entourage,” Parry said.
“Instead of hanging out in the hotel surfing the internet or watching a movie, I would bring my little 360 camera and put it in the harbour and see what I would see.”
He spent one night on the shores of Cape Cod and another day floating down a river in Germany, recording whatever caught his eye. The eclectic footage will be part of an immersive live performance he’s planning of his new solo album Quiet River of Dust Vol. 1 in Montreal later this year.
The seven-track exploration of ambient pop has been in the works for a decade. So far it’s two parts, though Parry thinks he might be shaping what could ultimately become third and fourth volumes.
“When I started it, I wasn’t even working on a project,” he said.
“With Arcade Fire taking off the way it did, I didn’t have a second to myself. I had this roller-coaster kind of life that was just barrelling ahead very fast.”
In 2008, the band slowed its hefty touring schedule with a two-date stop in Japan that was followed by several weeks of downtime. It gave Parry what he considered a rare opportunity to breathe after a gruelling schedule.
So he began exploring Japan’s natural and spiritual appeal, a journey that inspired much of his new album.
“There’s forest everywhere,” he said of the country. “As soon as you get out the city it’s not urban sprawl, it’s just green, incredible hillside forests and hot springs everywhere.”
Walking through secluded areas of Japan gave Parry a particularly strong connection with his surrounds, which led to both “moments of quiet and realization” and what he describes as ghost experiences.
There were times when “I would really feel the presence of someone or something that I couldn’t entirely put a name to or put my finger on,” he said.
“More than just energy. More than just the forests. I feel observed. I feel accompanied even though I’m totally alone ... there’s snow falling and I’m walking around in the forest.”
The haunting spirituality seeps into his album, especially on tracks such as Song of Wood and Gentle Pulsing Dust, which brush their fingertips along the afterlife while still inhabiting a tangible reality of flowing streams and birds chirping.
On the nine-minute song I Was in the World (Was the World in Me?) the sonic pulses climb to peaks before a crescendo opens into a valley of soft guitars and the sound of crickets.
Parry takes the lead vocals on most of the tracks.
“Volume 1 is the physical world of existence, the kind of here and now,” he said, while “volume 2 is perhaps a more liminal world. A little hazier. It feels a little less physical.”
The entire project is starkly different than what Arcade Fire fans might expect from a guitarist whose better known for playing Grammy-winning rock songs than experimental ruminations in psychedelic tranquillity.
Parry said he’s confident even if the art-rock band’s listeners don’t migrate over, his music will “find its own people” looking for more than another radio hit.
He plans to elevate the aural experience of Quiet River of Dust Vol. 1 by pairing a live concert with those visuals he captured on the road.
The residency at Montreal’s Satosphere dome runs Nov. 13-17 and 20-24. It will feel similar to a planetarium, he said, except the audience lays on cushions across the floor as they watch the world unfold above them on a spherical screen.
If the show proves successful, he hopes to secure future dates at similar venues across Europe, rather than perform at the usual club venues.
“I don’t want to have to compete with bar chit-chat,” Parry said of the album. “I want it to exist in places where it wants to exist, and not have to fend for itself.”