Photo: Hraïr Hratchian

Last month we heard the moving and magnificent ‘I Only Wish This For You’, the first single taken from Saltland‘s upcoming album A Common Truth. In addition to many other musical projects and collaborations, Rebecca Foon, the wonderful cellist behind Saltland, is also involved and dedicated to the fight for climate justice. This is reflected and central to A Common Truth, an album that explores themes of climate change and sustainability.

Ahead of the album’s release on March 31st through Constellation, Saltland is offering another incredible single from it, ‘Light Of Mercy’. Listen to it below.

There’s a new album on the way from Saltland, following her 2013 magical and outstanding debut I Thought It Was Us But It Was All Of Us. The enchanting Montreal based cellist Rebecca Foon, known as a founding member of Esmerine and a former member of Thee Silver Mt. Zion and Set Fire To Flames, amongst many other projects and collaborations, is also a climate consultant, involved and dedicated to the fight for climate justice. Her upcoming album, A Common Truth, explores themes of climate change and sustainability. The album “is a sonic meditation on climate change: the hope, diligence, anxiety, sadness and desperation of the climate movement and of our collective consciousness as social fabrics become increasingly frayed and scorched by fossil fuel dependency and environmental degradation”, describes the press release. A Common Truth, it adds, sees “Foon unfold[ing] an atmosphere and pace on the album that allows for the coexistence of optimism and despair, resolve and resignation, the intimacy of the local/personal and the hope of the global/collective.”

Unlike Saltland’s previous album which featured several collaborators, A Common Truth is mainly a solo effort, with cello being “the predominant source for all the music and sounds”, except for Warren Ellis’ contribution on violin and pump organ on four instrumentals.

Recorded by The Besnard Lakes’ Jace Lasek, the record arrives on March 31st via Constellation. Luckily, we can already wrap our wars around the moving and magnificent first single ‘I Only Wish This For You’. Here it is.

Here’s a befittingly beautiful video diptych for Saltland‘s ‘ICA’, a track lifted from the stunning debut I Thought It Was Us But It Was All Of Us. The video, created by visual artist Brad Todd, is divided in two frames; one with Rebecca Foon, who leads the project, in an underground train in New York and the other showing the Montréal cityscape filmed from an airplane window during winter. Watch it below and grab the track free here.

I Thought It Was Us But It Was All Of Us is out now via Constellation Records,

I Thought It Was Us But It Was All Of Us is the magical and outstanding debut album from Saltland, the new project led by Montreal based cellist Rebecca Foon, who is best known as a founding member of Esmerine and a former member of Thee Silver Mt. Zion and Set Fire To Flames.
The album was co-produced and mixed by Mark Lawson in Foon’s home studio in Montreal and it features a stellar cast of contributors, including Colin Stetson, Laurel Sprengelmeyer and Jess Robertson (Little Scream), Sarah Neufeld and Richard Reed Parry (Arcade Fire) and Mishka Stein (Patrick Watson), amongst others.
According to the press release, “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”.

I Thought It Was Us But It Was All Of Us came out earlier this week via Constellation Records, and to celebrate the release, Saltland is offering the beautiful ‘Treehouse Schemes’ as a free download. Here it is.