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 fulllength 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. Reverie is anchored by a clutch of recurring themes, with many of the album’s 11 tracks refracting various melodic and harmonic passages through different timbral and temporal lenses, evoking shifts in both subjective mood and external atmosphere. Drawing from Rebecca Foon’s parallel career as an environmental activist and organiser, as co-founder of Pathway To Paris (with Jesse Paris Smith) and Junglekeepers (with Paul Rosolie), Reverie channels the inescapable admixture of psycho-emotional subjectivity and climatic conditions experienced as literal weather and as collective existential crisis. Like a soundtrack to a movie never made, but that shapes the subconscious of our lives (one can imagine this music scoring a post-apocalyptic film portraying small shoots of hope springing out of devastating collapse), Reverie carries a lot of feelings in its double-edged title: dreams of the future and of possibility, so calamitously failing as any act of collective political will, condemning us to retreat into atomized neurosis and self-care, struggling to hold close those already closest, with art’s humble potential to provide solace and social stimulus at once ever more important and ever more spurious.
