Behind the Tapes: Richard Reed Parry in conversation with Nico Muhly

While arranging a night of music in Montreal in 2009, composer Nico Muhly wondered: “Who do I know who can write music who’s amazing and is Canadian and can come keep me company way up there?” The answer was Richard Reed Parry, composer and multi-instrumentalist for Bell Orchestre and Arcade Fire. In response, Richard presented to Nico For Heart, Breath and Orchestra, a piece that required musicians to play in sync with their own cardiac rhythm while following Richard’s scored notation.  

Richard gradually realised this idea more over the years. In 2014, it became his first solo work, Music for Heart and Breath, on which Nico played piano according to the same rules Richard had originally devised. 

Because of their shared history, the two composers’ conversation for Erased Tapes quickly becomes retrospective, but in a way that’s constructive not regressive. Instead, they’re searching for the drives and desires behind their old ways of working – a sort of archeological dig into the 00s when composers were becoming braver in crossing genre boundaries. In doing so, Richard Parry reflects on covering Aphex Twin with Bell Orchestre on As Seen Through Windows, and how doing so with a neoclassical ensemble was “mindblowing at the time”.   

They also talk about how artists like Aphex Twin and Björk’s Vespertine influenced radical shifts in the two composers’ understanding of how to communicate space, shape and a kind of versatile maximalism through sound, and the way they share this with us is rich in visual metaphors. 

Nico and Richard’s original meeting also marked Parry’s release of As Seen Through Windows with Bell Orchestre, which Erased Tapes reissued in 2023. The two friends begin their conversation by discussing this work, with Nico probing into the spaces in which it was created and its “specificity of thought”.

To hear the audio version of this conversation, listen here.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Nico Muhly: My initial observation was that the recording sounds like it could happen in a tiny intimate closet or in an opera house, or in someone’s house or in a chamber music situation. What was your vision for the space in which this music is heard? 

Richard Reed Parry: I was obsessed with this idea of “I want this to occupy all these different spaces”. At the time we were possibly going to be doing the music for the next La La La Human Steps ballet, and in lieu of that we were literally writing and recording their massive dance rehearsal studio in Montreal with rubber floors and this massive hall. And then we were writing in Banff in weird little tiny shacks in the woods.

NM: So it wasn’t just deliberate, it was also what had happened.

RRP: Yeah, it was [just] what had happened and was the ongoing idea of: this is what this needs to encompass, this is what it needs to feel like. [It started as] small and sonic experimentation in the closet, but we finished it in the church studio that was the Arcade Fire recording studio at the time. And we recorded it at John McEntire’s place, which was not a very big room. There was a lot of back and forth about whether we needed to do this somewhere more massive.

NM: I guess another question that stems from that is: when I think about the music you’re making as a composer right now, in the last five years, it feels like the human body… the closest physical place to the centre of the human body – the heart and mouth. I don’t not hear that in [As Seen Through Windows] as well. It’s like that with Airlines / Landlines too, which with the simplest mechanisms of the bow and then expands out. 

I was wondering whether that was the result of conscious thought? Because this kind of music is starting there. The idea of all those intimate things cohabiting with something that sounds quite epic, did that happen naturally or did you choose this actively?

RRP: I think there’s not enough time in the world to dwell in any of these spaces. All of these spaces are what this ensemble is capable of. I was obsessed with the smallest thing. Weird music boxes recorded on a tiny dictaphone, thinking “we need to make a whole record’s worth of that” and then making a whole record’s worth of tuned drum sets and making massive ocean waves out of drum sounds. 

Also, chamber duos and double bass and violins playing these quasi-romantic intimate little things. I was desperate – literally touring everywhere and in two bands, starting to write solo music, compositional, on paper music in between ensemble band tours. And I was obsessed with wanting more of all these different approaches.

NM: But then I also think about your work six years after that, when you made the Wave Movements (with Bryce Dessner), it’s actually an incredibly patient piece of music. Whereas I’d say that this album is very impatient. 

And in a weird way, I think that’s what’s so rich about it: it shares both instincts. We can get big, but we can also get small. 

For me, [Björk’s] Vespertine is what broke open that sonic landscape of “Fuck it, I’m going to make this whole album that’s an inch next to the laptop speaker. A laptop speaker with a dictaphone inside a celesta”. She literally just said “fuck it.” But in that song Unison she says “Oh by the way, your girl hasn’t forgotten how to do it”. 

RRP: Absolutely!

NM: And I sense that in your work too. I hate to compare artists to artists but it feels like the generosity and the specificity of that kind of thought exists in Bell Orchestre too. 

RRP: Totally, and very relevant. I was obsessed with Vespertine during my final year of college. And that was when Bell Orchestre was starting to be really really active, collaborating and starting to do dance, specifically contemporary dance. And I was obsessed with Vespertine. I was like “What is this, how is this, how do I?”

NM: I was like a junior in college and I was like “Ahhh shit! I need to figure this out!”

RRP: A lot of us had that moment, like: “How do I do this, but not exactly like this, but whatever is being crammed into this, how do I do that?” All of this on some level, all this was about cramming an absurd amount of detail into it.

NM: Another thing that I noticed is that sometimes you’re playing with notes, right, obviously you’re playing with notes. But sometimes it feels like notes are secondary to shape. So thinking even about Elephants [on As Seen Through Windows]. And now as an older-ass person, it’s like “actually, the pitches are a shorthand where these pitches come really naturally on these instruments, these are the harmonics that it makes if you just let it do its thing”. 

But the shape of the thing is what you’re really playing with. I don’t want to say if the notes were different it’d work the same, but it’s kind of like that compositionally. I’m wondering, did those things co-exist, or was it like, “Let’s make a shape and then figure out how to note it later?” 

RRP: Somewhere in between and back and forth I think. We would get fussy about melodies like “Oh, that’s not the right one, that’s really annoying!” and rewrite these things, recast them. You bend one thing one way, and then you go back and fix another thing. But definitely gestures being the driving force some of the time, and being like “There needs to be big weird explosive drums here, what supports that happening?”

NM: Sometimes you allow us as a listener to watch the germ of the idea explode out, and other times you’re like “No, we’re already in the jungle, I don’t have time to teach you how photosynthesis works!” and that’s that kind of shape thing again. 

There’s a kind of SimCity-ness to it too, where it just feels compositionally like you’re starting from a huge place of zoomed-out-ness, and also from a small place, which takes me to my next big question: if I’m looking through the lengths of this album, it’s like some stuff is two minutes long, some stuff is twelve minutes long. 

But I never felt like with a short piece that it couldn’t go on for longer, and I never felt like with the long pieces, I couldn’t get that drug in a faster delivery system. So what I’m wondering is how you thought about durational information?

RRP: Right. It’s a hard one, sorry! And it’s more mood-based than calculated. It’s probably not conceptually based except for that the goal was definitely for two minutes to be fine and twelve minutes be fine. In the same way that a tiny little duet should feel fine as well as having a big monstrous slog of echoes should feel fine and no-one can tell what anything is. 

NM: With the shorter pieces, are there other versions of them which are actually quite long?

RRP: No, there are longer versions of pieces that are actually quite short, where you cut them in half and go: “This is outstaying its welcome, this is more of a place to visit and not a place to live.” Rarely do we ever want something to be much longer than it was, because it was too short and didn’t expand on itself enough. Conversely, Airlines / Landlines could have been much shorter but it was like “This piece doesn’t have a point unless you linger in it long enough”. 

NM: Elephants is 10 minutes long more or less, isn’t it?

RRP: Totally, 10 or 12. 

NM: OK, because I was really interested in just how much space you’ve allowed each one to take up.

RRP: Well the interesting thing is, with a piece like Elephants – and what’s quite illustrative of the band’s process generally – that would have been primarily improvised, compositionally and then condensed. 

It was like “Woah, we’ve got this freeform composition of us playing for an hour and all of the ideas in the piece are basically there, but they take an hour. And nobody wants to listen to this for an hour. So how do we turn an hour into 10 minutes, but still keep all these ideas?

NM: Were you working off a single stereo recording of you guys fucking around for an hour?

RRP: Pretty much, at least for that one. 

NM: Did you edit it? Did you make a demo of how you wanted it to work?

RRP: No, we just threw ourselves into the compositional soup, like “This is so good, this is so good, but woah – it took us 10 minutes to develop one idea to the next, how do we just condense those things? And then you just develop all of these devices for doing this.”

NM: What was the record keeping like for it? Because that’s the other thing that I love about listening to it. One thinks to oneself, “this would be incredibly complicated to notate, but it would be complicated not to notate”. What does your manila folder from these sessions look like?

RRP: The manila folder has literal mini-disks in it. I had this precursor to an iPod, which really informed the sonic approach to so much of this music. So I had this thing that was this massive pager crossed with an iPod, it was called the iRiver.

NM: Do you still have it?

RRP: I do. What was amazing about them is that they’re basically a hard drive crossed with a voice-note recorder. We have those in our pocket all the time now with our iPhone, but that wasn’t a thing yet. So for me that was like a revolution. I had this box which could record and store music and I could put it on my computer and chop it up. This was just really mindblowing. 

The way that it recorded, I put this insane over-compression and distortion on things that sounded beautiful with the Elephants drum sound, we thought we had to imitate the accidental artefacts that we got through this voice recorder. And then the piece Icicles / Bicycles starts with this spooky upright bass and violin, and kind of weird echoing and overcompression again, it was like literally trying as hard as we could to imitate the sonic quality that this little voice memo recorder had. 

NM: It’s interesting that technology was so a part of it, you put it in a computer and edit it. I still work like that, but it’s weird to do that in the classical music universe to a certain extent, because you’re treating the material as audio, and then retrofitting it into a notational system. 

RRP: You’re essentially retrofitting it, right?

NM: It’s fascinating, and it never feels like prog rock logic, where there are blueprinted structures.

RRP: Right? But annoyingly at the same time, speaking of crossing over between genres, annoyingly it also puts its foot into the rock music, album making world where you have demoitis, right? 

Which is where you’re so attached to the first recording because your brain didn’t think it was doing anything permanent, it was just trying to get things down, and then somehow there becomes this magical quality in the capturing of things just for posterity, that actually becomes the musical quality that holds the whole thing together. And it’s so ephemeral, and so hard to get back. 

NM: All those albums I made in the studio, the demo is what ends up in the file. And not only ends up there, it ends up being essential, right? It becomes the thing that holds everything together. 

RRP: It’s also interesting because it’s where recorded music differentiates itself from composed music, in terms of what is the interior, essential thing which is truly the through line and makes you want to hear this again? What is it?

NM: I think about this metaphor all the time: the craziest thing about daddy longlegs, is that they’re so beautiful and delicate but the whole thing holding them together is that dot. That dot with want.

RRP: That dot with teeth! It’s like a pom pom. 

NM: About this album I was thinking what actually is the dot of this thing? Like, it’s, yeah, because it’s like, with a lot of your other music, and both as a collaborator, you know, thinking about that piece with Bryce or Heart and Breath, I can see the dot, right? Right. Like, Arcade Fire stuff, it’s, it’s like, the dot is covered in glitter.

RRP: I think this relates to some of your early recorded music too, like Mothertongue, where there is a collage element to the piece, it’s very composed, but you have snippets and fragments of voice which aren’t really repeatable in a sung way, or an essential part of the composition, but it’s like you also can’t get it back, because you’ve compositionally retrofitted the voice into the piece by cutting it up.

NM: It’s more about that process, going back to your album, where my ear is like “How would you write this down?” But even if I take away my professional musician hat, it’s always this question of what is serendipitous, what is planned serendipity, and setting up all these conditions of trusting musicians. 

Would you say that one way to listen to it is to try and suspend the idea of what’s compositional, vs what is improvised, vs what is curated, vs control? Is that fair?

RRP: Yeah. In fact the entire goal. All these ridiculous emails that I would send to John McEntire who is recording and mixing and producing… They were about the dot – there is a “dot here” that connects. 

This piece of music has to somehow feel like Éthiopiques recordings, these busted African jazz recordings from a certain era, but it also has to feel like Debussy but then when the drums get really big they can’t be trashy, and when it gets intimate it has to be like al dente intimate – like raw, really chewy and in our face. I would send these long absurd expansive paragraphs. Like “Can I contain these multitudes, so help me Lord?”

NM: So there are two things I want to ask you about Aphex Twin, we don’t have to go into it too much but I also want to go back to where what was happening in 2001 and Vespertine. I think for a lot of us, and I assume you agree… Aphex Twin really fucked me up. It’s like with notes and sound you’re happy to be ambient and also happy to be totally ADHD, and also unlistenable.

RRP: That piece specifically, that time in Montréal, it was like every undergrad contemporary dance variety night, of which there were so many all the time, someone would have done a piece to that piece. It was unavoidable. And someone doing a piece to Arvo Pärt was also totally unavoidable at that time. It was the moment where Arvo Pärt was massive, Te Deum was standard.

NM: As Seen Through Windows is a good example [of this], because there’s so much happening and you’re in all these different landscapes, you’re in this Ethiopian fever dream, but the kind of dot that moves us through it is this very delicate bed of harmonies. I can’t think of too many people who were doing this at that time. Do you want to talk about what it feels like to revisit this and what do you think a new generation of listeners might find, who were two when this came out?

RRP: The weird part, and what I think is so true for so many composers and artists of any sort, or even economic theorists, where you’re pushing against the grain and combining things that haven’t been combined before in a specific way at a time, but it’s all contextual. And you revisit the thing and you’re going “That is so much more standard now”, but being part of that wave led to the standardisation of an idea or group of ideas. 

Covering Aphex Twin as a classical or neoclassical ensemble now is totally standard fare, but at the time it was like “Dudes, sit down, here’s what we’re going to do! We’re going to learn how to play an Aphex Twin track.” And that was mindblowing for us. Actually covering the thing in all it’s weird idiosyncratic frenetic everything, really trying to get all those things but as a live band felt like “check it out!” 

NM: Now all the kids, like Louis Cole could do all that in one second. So one final concluding thought: I of course strenuously object to trying to squeeze this into genres. It’s not like the project of it, like genre-fuck, or whatever. It stems out of the bodies and minds of a group of really specific people. I’m wondering if you could give again the readers of this interview and listeners of this album a kind of gentle path of resisting talking about it in terms of genre. What would that be? 

RRP: For better or for worse, it’s a bit like the algorithms don’t know what albums it follows. The algorithms don’t quite know who to feed this to or after what. Which I think is both an artistic success and a pragmatic failure! 

NM: Like, John Lennon’s band, this…

RRP: Right! Recommended if you like Ringo Starr, Arvo Pärt and Mr Rogers… 

It feels like novel genre combinations are just not novel now, it’s just a thing. Everything is just so splintered into a million different strands and webby forms now that it’s impossible to even try to retrofit a title onto a thing, you have general genre touchpoints, electronic music touchpoints and then you have jazz touchpoints, then you have rock touchpoints.

NM: It reminds me so much of that period, so intimately.