The Ridge, the second solo album of Arcade Fire violinist Sarah Neufeld, is suspenseful, as you would expect from an album that peers over the titular precipice into imminent catastrophe.
“It’s easy to avoid reality as a human being,” Neufeld told the Emerald. “I’ve always been frustrated by the refusal to think long-term beyond our own immediate comforts and desires.”
This urgent, transient moment is integral to the Ridge‘s emotional makeup. Neufeld recognizes that as a musician, she may bear the obligation to raise her voice in the name of social change.
“It’s been a pretty big moment for everybody kind of slowly waking up the fact that climate change is real and that we need to stop being idiots. How can we write about anything and express ourselves without first being a little bit more awake to our reality?” she said in an interview with Exclaim.ca. “It’s pretty nuts.”
I asked Neufeld to what degree climate change – and, by extension, humanity’s delayed reaction – influenced The Ridge.
“My personal sentiments around the reality of our planet’s sustainability are women through my actions, how I express myself, and how I contextualize my own existence. That said, my actions as a touring musician are incredibly unsustainable from a climate change perspective,” she added. “It’s quite the onion.”
But Neufeld said Ridge isn’t about climate change. And despite the record’s undercurrent of anxiety, there’s no narrative to Ridge, but, she says, “more of a feeling” that fills the eight tracks that she was “reaching for and wanted to illuminate in a way that felt natural and exciting.”
The record, released on Feb. 26 on Paper Bag Records, is at times suspenseful and beautiful; it wouldn’t be out of place on a Terrence Malick film score. It offers not just a brilliant display of Neufeld’s fluency with the violin, but her charisma as well, even when she rarely sings on the almost entirely instrumental record.
Neufeld said the record’s title comes from her attraction of mountain ridgelines, and the human body’s physical ridgeline, where the neck meets the skull (or where a violin might rest).
“It’s a massive point of tension and release and I personally carry most of my pain there,” said Neufeld. “There was something about those two ideas that bound together and forged some kind of identity to this body of work as I was composing it.”
The titular track, clocking in at eight minutes long, is an epic first chapter for the album, and sets the tone perfectly. Neufeld’s ethereal, airy melodies recall the electric violin work from ‘70s British prog-rock band Curved Air. An emphatic rhythm punctuates Neufeld’s playing; Arcade Fire drummer Jeremy Gara’s assertive, domineering beats underscore the album’s haunting atmosphere.
“A Long Awaited Scar” builds with Bernard Herrmann’s Vertigo levels of hysterics, before its dramatic halfway change-up.
It’s easy to make simple comparisons between Neufeld’s intense fiddle-sawing and composer Arvo Part, or her cyclical minimalism and Steve Reich; but Neufeld herself cites some peripheral influences from electronic outfits Aphex Twin and Autecre and English rockers Slowdive. Since her tour kicked off in Los Angeles earlier this month, she says Boards of Canada’s Music Has the Right to Children has been on heavy rotation.
The 36-year-old composer is also a member of six-piece instrumental outfit Bell Orchestre, as well as regular collaborator with Arcade Fire saxophonist and multireedist Colin Stetson; the two released their record Never Were the Way She Was last year.
Outside of her musical career, Neufeld recently opened a yoga studio in Williamsburg in New York City. The key to practicing yoga on a chaotic tour schedule? Don’t be high maintenance about it. “I’ll do just about anything at any time, in any setting,” she said. “If I needed my yoga practice to happen at the same time every day in calm beautiful space, I’d be screwed.”
You can catch Neufeld practicing yoga and/or playing from The Ridge this Thursday, March 24 at the McMenamins Mission Theater (1264 NW Glisan) in Portland. Eartheater will open. Tickets are $15 in advance; $18 on the day of the show. Doors open at 7 p.m. and the show begins at 8.
Listen to “The Ridge” by Sarah Neufeld from her album The Ridge below.