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USED PROMO CD in EXCELLENT Condition - CD has a hole punch in the front sleeve (promo) - other than that is in EXCELLENT Condition

Pathway to Paris brings together musicians, artists, activists, academics, mayors, and innovators to help raise consciousness surrounding the urgency of climate action and offers solutions to turning the Paris Agreement into action. Founded in September 2014 by Jesse Paris Smith and Rebecca Foon, with an intimate evening of music and speakers at Le Poisson Rouge immediately following the People’s Climate March in New York City.

For almost two decades cellist Rebecca Foon has been a member of Canadian post-rock bands like Esmerine, A Silver Mt Zion and Set Fire To Flames and over recent years has released two albums under the alias Saltland. Waxing Moon is the first album released under her own name and sees a further distillation of her sound, with post-classical piano and her richly expressive voice taking centre stage ahead of the cello.

She’s clearly no stranger to immersive music, something proved by the opening moments here. New World is built around pristine piano arpeggios and Pour sees her add lyrics to dark, glistening pools of sound that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Labradford album.

Another Realm is one of the few tracks where the cello is dominant, a searching piece that slowly gives rise to vividly atmospheric surroundings. At times it sounds like the prelude to a particularly epic Godspeed You! Black Emperor track. This Is Our Lives, another cello-focused track that appears later on the album strikes a more plaintive tone.

Ocean Song has a tenderness, aided by Foon’s elegantly breathless vocals and it all comes together most successfully on the dynamic Wide Open Eyes which combines lusciously reverberating piano chords and soaring, foregrounded vocals. The title track re-establishes the deliberate sense of stillness and contemplation while the fluidity and pathos found in the later moments of the album suggest that Waxing Moon arguably has more in common with new artists like Keeley Forsyth rather than any residual post-rock aesthetic.

It’s such a refined, delicate album it might not noticed on initial listens but Foon calls upon a group of musical associates to provide subtle additional contributions over the course of the ten tracks. Richard Reed Parry of Arcade Fire plays bass, Sophie Trudeau of Godspeed You! Black Emperor adds violin, Jace Lasek of The Besnard Lakes supplies discreet touches of electric guitar and Patrick Watson is co-vocalist on the sublime Vessels. Yet, Foon is still very much the central musical presence.

The two albums she released under the Saltland name may have established her credentials as a composer in her own right but Waxing Moon feels a more personal, considered release that should give her the confidence to explore and develop her sound further. (Music OMH)

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.