Rebecca Foon & Aliayta Foon-Dancoes - Reverie

Montréal post-rock luminary Rebecca Foon (Esmerine, Thee 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.