SALTLAND is the new project led by Montreal-based cellist Rebecca Foon, best known as a founding member of contemporary chamber group ESMERINE and a former member of THEE SILVER MT. ZION and SET FIRE TO FLAMES. Foon began composing solo work in 2010, featuring multi-layered cello and hushed vocals at the intersection of drone, no-wave, improv, dream-pop and minimalism. Joined by Jamie Thompson (UNICORNS, ESMERINE) on miniature percussion, programming and signal processing, Foon's live performances in Montreal and abroad over the past two years have seen her sound progress towards gently rhythmic and electronic territory as well. She has transfixed audiences with this new music while sharing the stage with Mary Margaret O'Hara, Julia Kent, Nat Baldwin and Sam Amidon, among others. As her largely homerecorded debut album began taking shape throughout 2011, with numerous guests contributing to various pieces, Foon adopted the SALTLAND moniker for this work. "I Thought It Was Us But It Was All Of Us" is a beautifully restrained debut album that telescopes the directness and economy of Foon's compositional and vocal styles into lush, twilight atmospheres aglow with luminescent tendrils and flickering particles. 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. Foon's voice is discreet but defined, drifting on buoyant currents of sound sourced from her plucked and bowed cello lines, in most cases propelled by Thompson's bespoke percussion and understated programming/processing, with touches of guitar, bass, horns, woodwinds, strings and backing vocals added by a cast of supporting players. The record unfurls like a gauzy flag in a restless breeze at dusk: a delicate, resolute sentinel set against the fading light. With contributions from Laurel Sprengelmeyer and Jess Robertson (LITTLE SCREAM), Mishka Stein (PATRICK WATSON), Colin Stetson (BON IVER), Sarah Neufeld and Richard Reed Parry (ARCADE FIRE) among others, SALTLAND offers up an unassumingly immersive debut album of searching songs that blend several core influences into a distinctively naturalistic sound. SALTLAND stakes out an unaffected, meditative, clear-eyed and earnest space where minimalism, dream-pop, drone, shoegaze, confessional folk, modern chamber and ambient/electronic coexist and coalesce.