Bell Orchestre announce new album ‘House Music’

Montreal’s Bell Orchestre have confirmed that their first full-length album in over a decade will be arriving on 19th March via Erased Tapes!

Created almost entirely from a single improvisational session between its members, including Arcade Fire’s Sarah Neufeld and Richard Reed Parry, ‘House Music’ was recorded in a multi-story Vermont house, with each member assigned to a different recorded room.

As Sarah describes, “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. 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.”

“Most of my favorite 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,” adds Richard. “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.”

Watch the video for new single ‘V: Movement’ below.