Description

Detritus’, the third solo LP by violinist/composer Sarah Neufeld, confronts anguish with beauty, turmoil with grace, gliding through the present like a dancer mid-motion, reaching through space ’til she’s caught.

The album is wistful and emotive, and carries the listener on a journey of euphoric and complex looped violin dusted with mesmeric melody recall. Openers ‘Stories’ and ‘Unreflected’ lead with atmospheric ease, sombre soundscapes and distant, otherworldly vocals. ‘With Love And Blindness’ ups the tempo with remote, dreamlike rhythms that hypnotise and enthrall. ‘The Top’ is elated, but it highlights the isolated strings and poetic loneliness Neufeld is able to convey with them. ‘Tumble Down The Undecided’ and ‘Shed Your Heart’ are climatic in their delivery, full of cascading notes and delays before closer ‘Detritus’ exits with a state of calm, easing back into the shadows and taking with it the vivid textures and images crafted with infinite grace over the course of the album.

‘Detritus’ originated with a collaboration: in 2015, Neufeld was invited to appear on stage with the legendary dancer/choreographer Peggy Baker. Baker had prepared a solo piece based on work from Neufeld’s second album, ‘The Ridge’, to which Neufeld added an original lyrical prelude. The live result was an incendiary duet, almost a sort of face-off, which left each artist unsated. They agreed to reunite for a more extended collaboration – a full-length show with Baker’s company, where Neufeld would write to (and perform music alongside) Baker’s choreography.

It was a fertile partnership, uniting the two women’s intense, curious, ferocious sensibilities across an age difference of 29 years. Baker had conceived the show around the title of Neufeld’s prelude, “Who We Are In The Dark”, exploring themes of loss, betrayal and the emptiness of space; Neufeld was herself in crisis mode, reacting to a specific, earthbound kind of grief (including the end of a relationship). Making work together, they drew on these raw feelings – insistent, urgent darkness but also something that was, for Neufeld at least, much more unexpected: a romantic, tender-hearted love, inspired by the movements of the dancers before her.

The work premiered in February 2019. Even before Neufeld and Peggy Baker Dance Projects set off on tour, she had the intuition that this music might take another form: as a distilled set of songs, refined and developed beyond the versions performed on stage. Starting that summer, she began arranging this lush and soloistic material – work that eventually became ‘Detritus’ – and performed some of these experiments at her own solo gigs. Neufeld worked throughout the process with her Arcade Fire bandmate Jeremy Gara, whose drums, synths and ambient electronics co-anchored the Peggy Baker shows and helped shape the reimagined album versions. She would go on to add foot-pedal bass synth, wordless vocals and swells of French horn courtesy of Bell Orchestre compatriot Pietro Amato, bringing in woodwind wizard Stuart Bogie as a one-man flute ensemble, layering clusters of chords atop Neufeld’s luminous compositions.

Completed just weeks before COVID lockdown – and as “Who We Are In The Dark” capped off its year of touring – ‘Detritus’ offers a patient, gorgeous evolution of Neufeld’s sound: a soft and open-hearted musical landscape, where instead of being filled with striving, the sound is abiding and reflective. Neufeld – who trained in various dance modalities throughout her youth – brings her customary kineticism to these pastorals, like the song of shapes in motion. Yet the movements are different than they have ever been: inward-turning and outward-facing, deliberate and generous, acknowledging the world with a love that will not flinch – and never flags.

Of these tracks Neufeld tells us “I was inspired by both a sense of interior aloneness, and a sense of deep intimacy. Within both, a profound questioning of identity and intention, and ultimately, a grieving over one’s former sense of self. The stories we’ve told ourselves that we can no longer believe. Nestled within deep layers of comfort, familiarity, and solace, I’m able to repeat myself again and again, never learning, never looking back. Simultaneously becoming wiser and more ignorant as the years wind on, beauty and grace exist even here, in this rift.”