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Artist News Releases
Arcade Fire’s Richard Reed Parry announces two solo albums
By Andy Malt | Published on Tuesday 31 July 2018
Arcade Fire’s Richard Reed Parry has announced that he will release two new solo albums over the next year. ‘Quiet River Of Dust Vol 1’ is set for release on 21 Sep and will be followed by volume two next spring. Ahead of them both, he’s released two songs from the first volume: ‘Sai No Kawara (River of Death)’ and ‘On The Ground’.
The seeds of these two releases date back to Arcade Fire’s first tour of Japan, when they visited a monastery on a break from shows. Here, he says, he and his bandmates experienced “the biggest silence you’ve ever heard”. He adds that “the song ‘On The Ground’ was inspired by an encounter with ghost voices in a Japanese forest near a temple on the mountain Koya-S?n”.
Referencing the director of the video that accompanies the tracks, he goes on: “I told director Caleb Wood the story – of being alone in this magical environment of giant cedar trees and hearing a loud chorus of powerful harmony singing that sounded inexplicably identical to my late father’s folk band the Friends Of Fiddler’s Green, who were the soundtrack to my entire childhood and upbringing”.
He adds: “I’m lousy at sitting still and being nothing. But being out in the natural world or being immersed in music is the meditation for me. That’s the heart of this record: the experience of transcending the place that you’re in, getting lost in the feeling of where you end and where the world begins, in a dreamlike world of music and thought”.
Watch the video for ‘Sai No Kawara (River of Death)’ and ‘On The Ground’ here:
