CONSTELLATION 6th June 2025
The titles of the pieces alone will give you an idea of what to expect. Interweaving, hypnotising sounds. It’s modern chamber music – a cello, a violin and piano – and it makes for an absorbing, organic listen with new aspects revealing themselves on each play.
The duo of Rebecca Foon and Aliayta Foon-Dancoes are sisters and worked together in Esmerine. Rebecca is a long-standing member of Thee Silver Mount Zion, a seeding ground for a wide variety of talented offshoots, and a collaborator with Jesse Paris Smith, herself a sonic explorer. She’s even done the sleeve art herself. Aliayta Foon-Dancoes is a composer and classically-trained performer. Together, they have met and workshopped through the post-Covid era, composing and improvising, drawing on their experiences and the spaces they work in, making an organic and resonant feel.
Often meditative, the pieces form a whole that blends together, book-ended by a return to the opening theme. At times the work dips into dark thoughts or rises flying into sawing violin, fluttering with summer. Elsewhere the piano illustrates, adds arpeggios, processes, while the strings move around each other, massaging and gently pushing. It’s a deep and wide collection, one that draws the listener into a soundbath and keeps things moving on the surface as well as shifting undercurrents. A rewarding album, drawing on the slower side of Glass in ‘Devotion’ but retaining it’s own self through edging ambient with contemporary classical practice.