Heart and Breath: Rhythm and Tone Fields (OFFAIR) Richard Reed Parry & Susie Ibarra

• 1 Field I: After C 05:45
• 2 Field II: Slow Drift 05:30
• 3 Field III: Even 07:17
• 4 Field IV: Gong 02:20
• 5 Field V: Sarunay Shifting 04:35
• 6 Field VI: Floating Harmonic Rotation 14:51
• 7 Field VII: Overtone Heartbeats 04:43
• 8 Field VIII: Hands 02:48
• 9 Field IX: Simple Breath 02:53
• Total Runtime 50:42

Info for Heart and Breath: Rhythm and Tone Fields (OFFAIR)

A meditative music collaboration between composers Richard Reed Parry (of Arcade Fire) and Susie Ibarra, “Field II: Slow Drift” is a gently enveloping, avant-garde sound exploration. Parry and Ibarra collaborated remotely on the composition, which will appear on their forthcoming album Heart and Breath: Rhythm and Tone Fields (out 15 July). Remarkably, they used the rhythm of their heartbeats and breathing patterns to create each track on the album. “This doesn’t sound like any record I’ve ever heard,” Parry says in a statement. “There’s a sensibility to it that was enabled by remote recording, and the fact that we made our breath into music and then into samples and then we built on that to make an album.”

Richard Reed Parry
Susie Ibarra, drums set, percussion

Richard Reed Parry
is the musical polymath at the heart of the ever inventive art-rock band Arcade Fire, but his work and story reach far beyond. He debuted as composer with Music For Heart and Breath in 2014, formed the instrumental ensemble Bell Orchestre, and collaborated and performed with artists like David Bowie, David Byrne, Kronos Quartet, The National, and Nico Muhly. He recently released Quiet River of Dust Vol. 1+2 and created a 360 projected visual world for live performance in the dome at the Societé des Arts Technologiques, with touring to follow throughout 2019-2020.

As the red-headed polymath and multi-instrumentalist at the heart of the endlessly inventive art-rock band Arcade Fire, Richard Reed Parry has performed in front of immense crowds and sold millions of records across the world. But this is only one aspect of an artist whose unconventional trajectory has resulted in work that is as varied as it is surprising and unique.

In between the last few Arcade Fire world tours Parry has crafted an innovative debut record of solo compositions released in Summer 2014. Realized slowly and thoughtfully over a handful of years, Music for Heart and Breath is an exquisite collection of modern neo-classical pieces in which each note is played in synch with the heart rates or breathing rates of the performers, each musician generating their own tempo by listening to their pulse with a stethoscope during the performance. Produced with his great friend and collaborator Bryce Dessner of The National, the album features performances by Dessner, Kronos Quartet, Nico Muhly and YMusic Ensemble. At times fragile, playful, sombre and intimate, these unique and stunning creations have been dreamt into life by Parry's refreshing compositional approach and his own philosophical belief that music and nature - in this case the human body - can be, indeed are, explicitly linked.

Adding to the breadth of that picture, Parry has premiered a piece for Bang On a Can at the Ecstatic Music Festival in New York, created a surround-sound, sci-fi electronic composition for synths, voices and, yes, bicycles called Drones/Revelations, and collaborated on The National's last two critically acclaimed albums, the Grammy-nominated Trouble Will Find Me and High Violet. He recorded and produced Montreal artist Little Scream's magnificent debut album The Golden Record. In fall of 2014 the Brooklyn Academy of Music debuted a series of compositions he wrote for the Brooklyn Youth Chorus as part of Black Mountain Songs, an event curated by Parry and Bryce Dessner which also included pieces by Nico Muhly, Tim Hecker, Dessner and Pulitzer winner Caroline Shaw.

Susie Ibarra
is a Filipinx composer, percussionist, and sound artist. Her interdisciplinary practice spans formats, including performance, mobile sound-mapping applications, multi-channel audio installations, recording, and documentary.

Many of Ibarra’s projects are based in cultural and environmental preservation. She has worked to support Indigenous and traditional music cultures, such as musika katatubo from the north and south Philippine islands. She also collaborates with The Joudour Sahara Music Program in Morocco on initiatives that preserve sound-based heritage with sustainable music practices and support the participation of women and girls in traditional music communities.

Ibarra's sound research has advocated for the stewardship of glaciers and freshwaters. Water Rhythms: Listening to Climate Change (2020) is a collaboration with glaciologist, geographer, and climate scientist Dr. Michele Koppes, which maps water rhythms from source to sink. Ibarra’s composition is derived from field recordings of five global watersheds, including the Greenland ice sheet and glacier-fed rivers of the Himalayas. Water Rhythms is an acoustic story of human entanglements with a changing climate and landscape. The premiere of Water Rhythms was presented by Fine Acts Foundation and TED at Jack Poole Plaza, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada and Innisfree Gardens, Millbrook, NY (2020). It has also been shown at The Countdown Summit, Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom (2021); as part of Nothing Makes Itself at the ARKO Art Center, Seoul, Korea (2021); and as a multi-channel sound installation at Fridman Gallery, Beacon, NY (2021).

As a producer, Ibarra collaborates with Splice to create sound packs based in environmental sounds, traditional musical cultures, and her own extended percussion language. Sounds of the Drâa Valley Morocco is a sound pack featuring six traditional ensembles and soloists from South Saharan Morocco (2022). Ibarra has also collaborated with composer and bassist Richard Reed Parry on two sound packs and a new album of compositions focused on breath cycles and heart beats, Heart and Breath: Rhythm and Tone Fields (OFFAIR Records, 2022).

Ibarra is a recipient of the National Geographic Storytelling Grant (2020); a United States Artists Fellowship (2019); the Asian Cultural Council Fellowship (2018); a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant (2017); and a TED Fellowship (2010). She is a Yamaha, Vic Firth, and Zildjian drum artist.

She holds a B.M. from Mannes College of Music and a B.A. from Goddard College.

This album contains no booklet.