Saltland / Rebecca Foon
Composer and cellist Rebecca Foon has been a fixture of the Montréal music
community for two decades, performing and recording in a wide array of
contexts, most notably as co-founder of the modern chamber post-rock
ensemble Esmerine, as a member of Thee Silver Mt Zion Memorial Orchestra
(2001-2008) and Set Fire To Flames (2001-2004), and more recently at the
helm of her electro-acoustic songwriting project Saltland. With these four
entities, Foon has performed around the world and released over a dozen
albums on various imprints. Esmerine’s 2013 album Dalmak won the Canadian music industry’s Juno Award for Best Instrumental Album
and the band’s 2015 album Lost Voices was a finalist in this same category, along with winning the award for
Best Album Package. Following a series of six critically-acclaimed releases
by Esmerine and Saltland from 2011-2017, Foon began working on new solo
music featuring a heightened emphasis on vocals and piano, with her first
eponymous release arriving in February 2020.
Foon is co-founder of Pathway to Paris, the international concert series devoted to expanding awareness and
mobilization around the Paris Agreement, which has brought together
musicians like Patti Smith, Thom Yorke, Cat Power, Michael Stipe, Joan Baez,
Bob Weir, Flea and Talib Kwali along with writers and environmental
activists like Bill McKibben, Naomi Klein and Vandana Shiva, at events in
venues ranging from Le Poisson Rouge and City Winery in NYC to The Masonic
in San Francisco, Le Trianon in Paris, and Carnegie Hall. Pathway To Paris
launched the 1000 Cities Initiative for Carbon Freedom in partnership with the United Nations Development
Program in 2017, supporting cities to transition off of fossil fuels by
2040. Foon is also the co-founder of Junglekeepers, which since 2014 has
purchased land rights to over 100km2 of pristine rainforest concessions in
the Las Piedras region of Peru, protecting the land from illegal logging,
mining and poaching, training and employing local park rangers, and
supporting a biodiversity research station.
Foon was additionally a member of the instrumental trios The Mile End
Ladies String Auxiliary and Fifths of Seven, each of which released an album
in the mid-2000s, and she has been a guest musician on many recordings by
artists as diverse as Carla Bozulich/Evangelista, Patrick Watson, British
Sea Power, Little Scream, Grant Hart, Hrsta and Land Of Kush. She has
performed collaboratively with Patti Smith, Laurie Anderson and Tanya Tagaq
among many others. She was part of the National Parks Project music
commission in 2011, played strings in concert for Nick Cave and the Bad
Seeds in 2013, and was a core member of Colin Stetson’s ensemble for Sorrow
(A Reimagining of Gorecki’s Third Symphony) in 2016-2018.