Reverie by Rebecca Foon & Aliayta Foon-Dancoes

Montréal post-rock luminary Rebecca Foon (Esmerine, Silver Mt. Zion, Set Fire To Flames) is joined by award-winning violinist Aliayta Foon-Dancoes for a soundtrack of atmospheric post-classical chamber music on which the sisters play cello and violin respectively, along with piano by both. This debut full-length collaboration, produced by Jace Lasek (The Besnard Lakes, Patrick Watson, Godspeed You! Black Emperor), is suffused with immersive full-spectrum resonance and spaciousness, tinted with subtle electronic touches and gently blown-out acoustics. Balancing swirling lushness and contemplative solemnity, Reverie is at once cinematically wide-screen and intimately introspective, flowing with a poignant melodic lyricism throughout. This consummate sibling duo unfolds a sumptuous suite of thematic variations that interweave meditative pastoralism with the underlying despair and tragedy of ecocide.

Rebecca’s post-rock, electroacoustic, and semi-improvised sensibility, honed by nearly three decades of composing and playing in a wide range of projects rooted in Montréal’s fertile DIY/punk-influenced exploratory instrumental music scene, combines with Aliayta’s more recent trajectory from virtuosic youth performer to academic music study and the formation of independent ensembles interpreting classical and modern repertoire. Following several years in London at both the Royal Academy and Royal College of Music, Foon-Dancoes’ recent move to Princeton University for a Composition PhD brought her into geographic proximity with her sister to the north, where they had already begun writing and playing together during a couple of post-pandemic retreats at Lost River, Rebecca’s converted barn studio in the Laurentian mountains of Québec. Aliayta also joined Rebecca’s chamber-rock group Esmerine for various performances in support of its celebrated 2023 album Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More (winner of the Canadian Juno awards for Best Instrumental Album and Best Album Packaging), while the two concurrently continued developing their own body of work. Further influenced by the acoustic space of the barn studio and the production style of Lasek (a long-standing Foon collaborator and the recording/mixing engineer for Esmerine’s award-winning run of albums from 2013-2023), the sisters forged a musical language and rapport drawn from composition and improvisation in equal measure, along with additive reinterpretation animated by ongoing recording processes.

Reverie is anchored by a clutch of recurring themes, with many of the album’s 11 tracks refracting various melodic and harmonic passages through different timbral and temporal lenses, evoking shifts in both subjective mood and external atmosphere. Drawing from Rebecca Foon’s parallel career as an environmental activist and organiser, as co-founder of Pathway To Paris (with Jesse Paris Smith) and Junglekeepers (with Paul Rosolie), Reverie channels the inescapable admixture of psycho-emotional subjectivity and climatic conditions experienced as literal weather and as collective existential crisis. Like a soundtrack to a movie never made, but that shapes the subconscious of our lives (one can imagine this music scoring a post-apocalyptic film portraying small shoots of hope springing out of devastating collapse), Reverie carries a lot of feelings in its double-edged title: dreams of the future and of possibility, so calamitously failing as any act of collective political will, condemning us to retreat into atomized neurosis and self-care, struggling to hold close those already closest, with art’s humble potential to provide solace and social stimulus at once ever more important and ever more spurious. Thanks for listening.

Rebecca Foon is a Canadian cellist, composer, and activist known for her work with Esmerine, Saltland, and film scores. She has collaborated with Laurie Anderson, Patti Smith, Flea, Nick Cave, and Tanya Tagaq. As co-founder of Pathway to Paris and Junglekeepers, she merges music and climate activism. Her work spans compositions, installations, and photography, exploring nature and sustainability.