Saltland - A Common Truth (2017)

The second solo album by Rebecca Foon, composer and cellist from Esmerine, Thee Silver Mt Zion and Set Fire To Flames. Features special guest Warren Ellis (Nick Cave, The Dirty Three) on the album's four instrumental tracks. RIYL: Juliana Barwick, Stars Of The Lid, Ólafur Arnalds, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, Eluvium, Tara Jane O Neil, Warren Ellis/Nick Cave soundtracks. The second album by Saltland, the solo project of veteran Montreal cellist and composer Rebecca Foon (Esmerine, Thee Silver Mt Zion, Set Fire To Flames). With A Common Truth, Foon presents a new song cycle that takes climate change as its theme (Foon is co-founder of Pathway to Paris, among other organizing and activist roles in the decarbonization movement) and features her cello as the primary source for all sounds on the record. The one notable exception: Warren Ellis (Nick Cave, The Dirty Three) is the sole invited guest player, contributing his inimitable violin (and pump organ) to the album's four instrumental tracks. A Common Truth is an album of gorgeous integrity, restraint, and meditative intensity that alternates between wordless instrumentals and lyric-driven pieces, balancing austere, organic intimacy and lush, multi-layered expansiveness. The naturalistic rock production of Jace Lasek (The Besnard Lakes) anchors Saltland's juxtaposition of dry and proce ssed strings, with Foon's voice very much within the mix but never veiled or concealed; a voice described as "an instrument of somnolent, gossamer allure which floats gracefully amid the eddying, amniotic music" (Mojo). Electronic music strategies, via signal processing and re-sampling, are deployed minimally and judiciously - and all the more powerfully as such. Rebecca Foon's new Saltland album A Common Truth is a compelling coalescence and fullest musical expression of the inspiring trajectories charted by this committed and renowned artist, activist and organizer.