Detritus

Sarah Neufeld describes Detritus as the “cherry on top of a longer experience.” The Arcade Fire and Bell Orchestre violinist’s third solo album grew out of who we are in the dark, her collaboration with Canadian dance artist Peggy Baker which saw Neufeld write and perform to Baker’s choreography. Out of those compositions have emerged seven atmospheric symphonies. It’s an album that feels expansive and stripped down at the same time—that veers into dark soundscapes but always lets a little light in. “I toured a lot with the dance company, and then I started to chisel things down and compress and think about recording it,” Neufeld tells Apple Music of the record’s beginnings. “I recorded it in the fall of 2019, and making it was probably the most efficient work I’ve ever done. It was a week and a half of recording, then a week of mixing with some touch-ups.”
Mixing the orchestral flourishes of her previous two solo records, 2013’s Hero Brother and 2016’s The Ridge, with synthy textures, electronic soundscapes, and gently intense grooves, it’s Neufeld’s most complete work. “I think now I’m into taking things a bit slower and having my music feel a bit more patient, be a bit more reflective of the kind of music I actually listen to,” Neufeld says. As you would expect from its genesis, Detritus is an album that moves with grace and elegance, an ambient album that also fully beckons you into its world. This is not background music. Neufeld talks us through it, track by track.
“Stories” “On the soundtrack that it came from, this was the moment where everything landed and became tender and I felt like things got really connected. For me, it always felt like, ‘Okay, that's going to be the beginning of the record,’ because it feels like, not to be cheesy, but like when the sun comes out after the rainstorm, when everything is still wet and the sky is still gray but you have this light coming in. It gives you that soft landing feeling, and I wanted to start the album like that. I kept the order of almost the whole rest of the show because those pieces are written in a way they unfold onto the next one.”
“Unreflected” “This is limbo. It's an in-between, because you start to have melodies and fragments of pieces that come later on. It's the earthy material that then unfolds into these later pieces. It's quite trancey and ambient and it doesn't go many places as a song. It's like a room that you walk into and go, ‘Oh, okay, these things are in here.’ It's a bit more hypnotic. And the arpeggios and the melodies in there—I wanted to deconstruct those main themes into this limbo, hypnotic field. And you've got lower tones and it's almost like a reprise, but then used as a starting point, if that makes sense.”
“With Love and Blindness” “This one's this lovely moment where the music becomes, I say, lyrical, but then there's no lyrics, but there's this lilting movement energy, and it's quite fluid. The interplay between violin and drums is really nice—it's almost like an old waltz. I tried to record it a couple months earlier alone without drums, thinking I could put the drums on top of it later if I did it to a click track. And it's this loose timing that has to be exactly felt in this human way together and connected. And so I threw out that demo and Jeremy [Gara, Arcade Fire drummer] needed to come in for it because it's the way the violin and drums play off each other that creates that feeling of just spinning and twirling and feeling free.”
“The Top” “This was a piece that I’d composed earlier. I wrote it when I was on tour with Arcade Fire for the Everything Now tour. It’s a jumping-off point, I think, for an evolution of my style that still holds the rhythmic and repetition work and the vigor of my previous stuff, but it allows a lot more lightness and beauty and patience in it. Writing this piece, I felt like, ‘Okay, I'm going to go somewhere slightly different on this next album,’ and I didn't know where that place was yet, but this piece really goes in a direction.”
“Tumble Down the Undecided” “In a way, this is my favorite. Musically, it's less relaxing to listen to. I watched this early stage of a choreography in the studio and the main motif—the way there was this one woman walking across with such fierce determination and then all seven dancers meeting her, turning around, and thundering back. It just made complete sense. I played it and everybody was like, ‘Yes!’ It's a 10-minute-long song and it took a lot of work and then it has a second half that's completely different. It’s the second half that you hear the same turns of phrases and melodies and arpeggios as in ‘Unreflected’ and ‘With Love and Blindness.’”
“Shed Your Dear Heart” “This is the softer epic. It's the flip side to ‘Tumble Down the Undecided.’ In the world of that dance show, what was happening was this zooming out on all of these different relationships and how they were coming together and falling apart and just very human love stories. And so it's almost like listening to the story of many people's lives in the romantic sense.”
“Detritus” “This has similar melodic information as ‘Stories,’ and maybe it's the Virgo in me, but I really like an arc. This is like the bookend. You hear the beginning and the ending. You hear it inside of itself, but it's landing in a totally different way with much more ominous depth and much more ambience. The word 'detritus' is a little bit like, ‘Oh, it's rubbish,’ but in this way, it's really the remnants left over and that's what you have to then rebuild, or even just, that's what's left. It's both dark and light. It's like the ashes after a horrible fire, but if you look closely, there's a beautiful piece of a photograph there and a plant survived there. It's a loose idea, but that captured where I was at in my own life. It felt like the right title for the music.”