Heart and Breath Ambient Hypnotic

In 2021, Splice approached composer/performer/sound artists Richard Reed Parry and Susie Ibarra to create a body of new musical work together as a first time, long distance music collaboration.

The two decided to expand on an idea used in Parry’s prior composition work – using the rhythms of their heart rates and breathing patterns as the basis for rhythmic tempos and musical dynamics paired with Ibarra’s extended rhythmic and melodic percussion language and her ongoing interpretive practice of Philippine gong music.Despite never having met in person, the two artists began working together remotely under the confines of Covid lockdown, sending ideas and recordings back and forth and building up compositions using upright bass, traditional Philippine gongs, drums, piano, guitar, harp and all manner of unique percussion sounds. The compositions that emerged are hypnotic fields of sound that seem to float suspended in time and space, unfolding gently in a manner that is at once intimate and expansive, and which connects the listener to their own most primal, internal body rhythms. Together these tracks form an album that abandons predetermined musical forms and follows its own intuitive body-logic. While the global pandemic brought a unique poignancy to the artists’ focus on the universal human sounds, the music they created brims over with gentle, organic rhythm and melody and reflects the deeply introspective and inherently personal moment surrounding its creation.From this album, Splice derived a truly one-of-a-kind beautifully tactile and uncategorizable sample pack designed to create a hypnotic soundtrack for a film, meditation practice, or any mindful context. For the first time on Splice Heart and Breath: Ambient Hypnotic is your chance to collaborate with the building blocks of an album and interpret these sounds in an entirely new direction. Get lost in this magical free flowing world of Heart and Breath and embrace a new musical humanity in your next creative endeavor. ———Richard Reed Parry is the music polymath in the heart of the art-rock band Arcade Fire, but his work reaches far beyond. In addition to navigating Arcade Fire’s adventures across the globe for the past 15 years, Richard released his debut album as a composer “Music For Heart and Breath,” composed soundtracks for film and art installations featured in the MET and Festival International de Jazz Montreal and collaborated/performed with artists across a dazzling musical/artistic spectrum including David Bowie, David Byrne, the New York Philharmonic, Neil Young, The National, Preservation Hall Jazz Band, Mick Jagger, Spike Jonze, Sufjan Stevens, Nico Muhly, Justin Vernon, Caroline Shaw, Sam Amidon, Terry Gilliam, and more. He has won a Grammy Award for Album of the Year, Juno Awards for both Arcade Fire and Bell Orchestre, The Polaris Prize, Brit Awards, and Socan Awards among others. Susie Ibarra is a Filipino composer, drummer/percussionist, and sound artist who creates live and immersive music that invites people to connect to their natural and built environments, Ibarra is a 2020 National Geographic Explorer in Storytelling, 2019 United States Artist Fellow in Music, and a 2018 Asian Cultural Council Scholar supported by the Rockefeller Foundation. She is a Senior TED Fellow and a Yamaha, Zildjian, and Vic Firth drum artist.