(2021) Bell Orchestre - House Music


Review:
Bell Orchestre have announced House Music, their first new album together in over a decade. The group, who include Arcade Fire‘s Sarah Neufeld and Richard Reed Parry among their members, are now gearing up to release their first full-length record since 2009’s Who Designs Nature’s How. House Music is described as “an immersive ecosystem of an album” which “unfolds as one long piece”, and is set for release on March 19 via Erased Tapes. Written and recorded almost entirely in Neufeld’s house in Vermont, Bell Orchestre’s – who consist of multi-instrumentalists Neufeld, Parry, Kaveh Nabatian, Pietro Amato, Stefan Schneider and Michael Feuerstack – House Music was crafted from an hour-and-a-half-long improvisation. “If you sliced away the front wall of the house and looked in, you’d see the horn section — with so many different things going on — down on the first floor of what would normally be the living/dining room, and it was full chaos with tables and tables of kalimbas and harmonicas and synthesizers and horns,” Neufeld said in a statement about the record. “Then you travel up a floor, and there’s me and Richie in an empty, warm sounding wooden bedroom. Mike was on pedal steel in the bathroom, on the same floor as us. And then up the stairs, through the ceiling and in the attic, was Stefan, alone on drums. “It’s a big piece of land, and if you went outside to take a break, you’d look over and hear all of this crazy shit coming out of all the different floors, and it filled this valley, and there were lots of rocks so the sound would bounce around. It was spooky and glorious.” Arcade Fire and Bell Orchestre musician Parry also commented on the record in a statement, saying that “most of my favourite recordings have some element of an explorative and accidental feeling within the music, a feeling which reflects the truth of musical minds which are partially super focused on specific musical ideas and partially wandering, exploring the musical world surrounding those ideas”. “I think it’s really satisfying as a listener when you can hear a musical mind exploring an idea — not just a musician who has pre-formed an idea and rehearsed it 100 times until it’s totally perfect and ironed out. In this recording, every one of the six of us is simultaneously exploring our own ideas, deeply listening to each others’ wide-open minds and also totally immersed in our own strange and beautiful little internal musical worlds.”





Tracklist:
01-Opening
02-House
03-Dark Steel
04-What You're Thinking
05-Movement
06-All the Time
07-Colour Fields
08-Making Time
09-Nature That's It That's All
10-Closing


Media Report:
Genre: classical, post-rock
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits