Richard Reed Parry

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Richard Reed Parry (Joe Barker)

Long before he joined Montreal’s Arcade Fire in 2003, Richard Reed Parry grew up in a thriving folk music community in Toronto, where house parties were full of singing, where weekly gatherings featured dances of the british isles, where all the progeny were routinely corralled into singing on popular children’s albums.

While a student of electroacoustic music and contemporary dance in university, he formed the instrumental ensemble Bell Orchestre, who have released three albums, with another expected soon. In 2014, he released an album of biologically inspired compositions, Music for Heart and Breath, on the prestigious Deutsche Grammophon classical label.

His latest album, Quiet River of Dust, has been slowly gestating for the last decade, in many ways a necessary respite from Parry’s other gigs. Creating this music grew into a meditative practice. "I’m lousy at sitting still and being nothing," he says. "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." It is music meant to be absorbed in a setting devoid of other distractions, not shuffled into your streaming playlist—a tall demand these days but one worth the time. (-Michael Barclay, the author of The Never-Ending Present: The Story of Gord Downie and the Tragically Hip)