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Feb 17, 2021 By Mark Redfern

Bell Orchestre (which features Arcade Fire’s Sarah Neufeld and Richard Reed Parry) are releasing their first new album in 12 years, House Music, on March 19 via Erased Tapes. Now they have shared another song from it, “IV: What You’re Thinking,” via a video for the track. Watch and listen below.

The band have also announced a new performance film to accompany the album that will stream online for 48 hours from 7 p.m. ET this Thursday, February 18 in conjunction with Southbank Centre’s “Inside Out” series in London and the Ecstatic Music Festival in New York. Tickets for the U.S. screening are $15 and available here.

Previously they shared House Music’s first single, “V: Movement,” which was one of our Songs of the Week.

A press release says the album was “created almost entirely from a single improvisational session between its members.” It was recorded in Neufeld’s rural Vermont house with the aid of engineer Hans Bernhard. The band features Neufeld (violin, vocals), Parry (bass, vocals), Pietro Amato (French horn, keyboards, electronics), Michael Feuerstack (pedal steel guitar, keyboards, vocals), Kaveh Nabatian (trumpet, gongoma, keyboards, vocals), and Stefan Schneider (drums).

Neufled had this to say in a press release: “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.”

Parry had this to say: “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. 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.”

The band’s last album was 2009’s As Seen Through Windows.

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