Artist : Saltland
Album : I Thought It Was Us But It Was All Of Us
Year : 2013
Genre : Avantgarde
Quality : 222kbps / 44.1KHz / Joint Stereo
Source : CD
Playtime : 0h 38m
Size : 64.45mb
Label : Constellation
Catalognr : CST094
Tracklist:
01. Golden Alley 4:23
02. I Thought It Was Us 2:56
03. Treehouse Schemes 6:17
04. Unholy 4:53
05. But It Was All Of Us 5:38
06. Colour The Night Sky 5:00
07. ICA 4:06
08. Hearts Mend 5:14
Releasenotes:
Saltland is the new project led by Montreal-based cellist Rebecca Foon, best
known as a founding member of contemporary chamber group Esmerine and a former
member of Thee Silver Mt. Zion and Set Fire To Flames. Foon began composing solo
work in 2010, featuring multi-layered cello and hushed vocals at the
intersection of drone, no-wave, improv, dream-pop and minimalism. Joined by
Jamie Thompson (Unicorns, Esmerine) on miniature percussion, programming and
signal processing, Foon's live performances in Montreal and abroad over the past
two years have seen her sound progress towards gently rhythmic and electronic
territory as well. She has transfixed audiences with this new music while
sharing the stage with Mary Margaret O'Hara, Julia Kent, Nat Baldwin and Sam
Amidon, among others. As her largely home-recorded debut album began taking
shape throughout 2011, with numerous guests contributing to various pieces, Foon
adopted the Saltland moniker for this work.
I Thought It Was Us But It Was All Of Us is a beautifully restrained debut album
that telescopes the directness and economy of Foon's compositional and vocal
styles into lush, twilight atmospheres aglow with luminescent tendrils and
flickering particles. Foon sings of childhood innocence lost, of tender utopic
reveries and downcast dystopic horizons, and the search for soft, stoic strength
in a darkening, devolving world. Foon╞s voice is discreet but defined, drifting
on buoyant currents of sound sourced from her plucked and bowed cello lines, in
most cases propelled by Thompson's bespoke percussion and understated
programming/processing, with touches of guitar, bass, horns, woodwinds, strings
and backing vocals added by a cast of supporting players. The record unfurls
like a gauzy flag in a restless breeze at dusk: a delicate, resolute sentinel
set against the fading light.
The album's ambience also owes much to the work of Mark Lawson, the
award-winning engineer (Arcade Fire) who collaborated closely with Foon to
record and mix these songs at Six Saint V, her apartment studio in Montreal.
Lawson, along with friend and percussionist Thompson, helped to forge a balance
between lo-fi intimacy and shimmering breadth with these recordings, remaining
faithful to the all-anologue instrumentation of the source material while
judiciously deploying signal processing strategies to subtly refract, saturate
and expand the sonic landscape. With contributions from Laurel Sprengelmeyer and
Jess Robertson (Little Scream), Mishka Stein (Patrick Watson), Colin Stetson
(Bon Iver), Sarah Neufeld and Richard Reed Parry (Arcade Fire) among others,
Saltland offers up an unassumingly immersive debut album of searching songs that
blend several core influences into a distinctively naturalistic sound. Saltland
stakes out an unaffected, meditative, clear-eyed and earnest space where
minimalism, dream-pop, drone, shoegaze, confessional folk, chamber music, and
ambient/electronic coexist and coalesce.
http://cstrecords.com/cst094/