list.co.uk/festival Wave Movements | FESTIVAL FEATURES
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musicians are often much more blurred than many may appreciate. Take Sufjan Stevens for instance, who brings one of the most critically acclaimed albums of the year to EIF in indie-folk heartbreaker Carrie & Lowell (see preview, page 6). He’s an artist Dessner knows well as a collaborator both in his classical career and with The National. ‘You have a musician like Sufjan who grew up playing oboe and writes ballets and classical music,’ he says. ‘He’s obviously an extremely talented songwriter, but he’s someone who probably has more in common with his composer peers than he does other pop songwriters.’ Responding by email from Japan, Parry is rather more succinct in his praise of changes afoot at EIF. ‘Go Edinburgh!’ he writes. ‘The walls are down. It’s fantastic. Let’s all make the most of that.’
While Dessner grew up surrounded by classical music, learning Bach fugues on the guitar from a young age (he describes his electric guitar playing in The National as being ‘more inl uenced by Steve Reich’s Electric Counterpoint than it is by Jeff Beck or Jimmy Page’), Parry’s background lies principally in folk. His late father David Parry was an inl uential i gure on the Canadian folk scene in the 1970s and 80s, and Richard was raised in a very musical household, an atmosphere which ‘i rmly established that music was just something that I do, almost all the time,’ he says, ‘whether it’s singing, playing, composing or collaborating.’
A multi-instrumentalist – he’s the Napoleon Dynamite-alike who can just as likely be spotted squeezing an accordion as he can banging out percussion on a motorcycle helmet – Parry began experimenting with instrumental chamber music with his group Belle Orchestre, several
members of which also play with Arcade Fire. Belle Orchestre have performed often alongside Dessner’s improvisatory side-project Clogs, ever since he and Parry i rst met and bonded when The National and Arcade Fire by chance found themselves playing different rooms at the same Amsterdam venue in 2005. Ten years later, Wave Movements comes to Edinburgh, a score for string orchestra with percussion that Dessner describes as ‘quite trance- inducing’ and ‘minimal in its aesthetic’. ‘We were thinking about the naturalistic element of the sea and the sound that the sea makes, the sound that nature makes,’ he explains. ‘We thought about the instrument itself as an extension of the body and the natural properties of the string instrument. Various things like circular bowing and certain types of harmonics. Very specii c things in terms of timbre and tone and where you place the bow on the instrument.’ According to Parry, the audience can expect ‘a very hypnotic, beautifully ephemeral musical experience.’ As for The National and Arcade Fire, what are their present statuses? The National are ‘having a good time’ writing new material, says Dessner. ‘I think where our last album Trouble Will Find Me had a kind of layered and well-crafted feeling about it, the new works we’re doing sound much more effortless. It’s all happening quicker. So it’s really fun.’ For Arcade Fire, the future is a little vaguer. ‘We’re hiding and averting our eyes for a while,’ writes Parry. ‘There’s a live i lm coming out in the fall [The Rel ektor Tapes], and we’re playing music casually together when the mood strikes. But no big plans right now.’
Wave Movements, The Hub, 473 2000, 28 Aug, 9.15pm, £25.
20–31 Aug 2015 THE LIST FESTIVAL 25