Richard Reed Parry

Inspired by a stay in a Buddhist monastery, the sounds he heard on his long walks through the snowy woods on Mount Kōya in Japan reminded Parry of the folk music he had heard in his childhood. Music full of open space, quietude, cicadas, echoes and the sounds of nature.

The immersive sonic environments of his visit to Japan led Richard Reed Parry to the folk song form of his new songs that tell of disappearing villages, ecstatic wind storms, departing family members, cyclical rivers, spirit radios and endless rain. A story emerged of a boy travelling to the seaside with his parents, disappearing into the ocean and his body dissolving into the molecules of the enormous body of water in which he swam – a sudden transformation into all the elements of the natural world.

In the manner of the both real and mythical river Sai No Kawara Parry gave his collection of songs the title “The Quiet River of Dust”. The “River of Death” is a mythical place where children who die before their parents go to wait before travelling on to an afterworld and also a real one where parents who have lost a child go to grieve and pray. Parry’s music includes the dense orchestral textures of Arcade Fire and Bell Orchestre as well as the boundary-pushing instrumental work of his neoclassical solo compositions. Together with the team from the Canadian Society for Arts and Technology (SAT) he has created a hypnotic live experience for a sonically and visually immersive dome environment that will be performed in Europe for the first time as part of “The New Infinity” at the Planetarium Hamburg.