'Unfolding' is Jessica Moss’ most meditative and plaintive solo album, and perhaps the first in the Montréal violinist/composer’s decade-spanning discography that might properly be called ambient.

The ex-Silver Mt Zion and Black Ox Orkestar member draws from post-classical, drone, minimalism, industrial/metal, power electronics, Klezmer and other folkways. This is not abstract ambient music; layers of violin melody, electroacoustic processing, intermittent voice, and percussion from The Necks drummer Tony Buck, bring forth deeply emotive genre-defying compositions guided by a spirit of searching and summoning that unfold in a prevailing atmosphere of incantation and mournful restraint.

The inseparability of the personal and political has wrung ever tighter for Moss over the past two years. As a core member of the Montréal chapter of Musicians For Palestine, she’s co-organized and played several benefit shows, and released the solo album For UNRWA in spring 2024 (garnering over 800 supporters and raising thousands of dollars). Later that year, her long-term long-distance relationship melted down over politics. Working closely with producer Radwan Ghazi Moumneh (Jerusalem In My Heart), Moss notes “Unfolding was made slowly, over the last 12 months, the second full year of genocide in Palestine, in direct response to our collective witnessing, our collective grief, as a portal to collective mourning, as a searchlight through our internal weather systems, seeking one another out in the dark.” Moss was already moving towards heightened fragility and deep listening, her music becoming increasingly durational and ceremonial. Despite the plummeting financial viability of touring, her devotion to holding space, conjuring entanglement, and connecting with intimate live audiences became her creative lodestar, her solo praxis shaped by committing to and communing in these rooms. Recent political and personal upheavals have only intensified these ritualistic, reparative musical processes.

Unfolding is dedicated to “a free Palestine in our lifetime.” Thanks for listening.

TRACK LISTING

1. Washing Machine
2. One, Now
3. No One
4. No Where
5. No One Is Free
6. Until All Are Free

The companion album to Phosphenes (Nov 2021) by the composer-violinist of Thee Silver Mt Zion, Set Fire To Flames, Black Ox Orkestar.

Featuring guests Jim White (Xylouris White, Dirty Three) and Thierry Amar (Godspeed You! Black Emperor.

RIYL: Dirty Three, The Body, Stars Of The Lid, Kali Malone, This Will Destroy You, Sarah Davachi, Thee Silver Mt Zion.

Galaxy Heart is the companion album to Phosphenes (Nov 2021) and completes an intensive body of work that Montréal composer-violinist Jessica Moss wrote, performed and self-produced in deep isolation throughout 2020. As A Closer Listen wrote in its Top Ten Modern Composition list for 2021, “few musical voices represent so well the estrangement and intensity of our times; Moss is among the best of them.” Galaxy Heart consolidates this assessment, revealing the more exploratory and extemporaneous side of her profoundly expressive instrumental lyricism. Where Phosphenes showcased some of Moss’ most deliberate and accomplished post-classical compositions to date, Galaxy Heart quivers with a raw and searching energy, juxtaposing rough-hewn and honed pieces. Expanding the palette to include spiky semi-improvised electric guitar along with remotely-recorded guest contributions from drummer Jim White (Xylouris White, Dirty Three) and contrebassist Thierry Amar (Godspeed You! Black Emperor) on a couple of tracks, the album inscribes a (mostly) instrumental space of bristling anguish, melancholia, resoluteness and conviction.

Opening with the distorted dissonant string clusters of “Resistance Creature” and the through-composed knock-out “Uncanny Being”, with White’s roiling drums and Amar’s upright bass the simmering substratum for Moss’ alternately gritty and rounded violin movements, Galaxy Heart pivots to electric guitar and sludged post-industrial drone on “This Continuous Spectrum”, a descending melodic motif recurring over doomy low-end bursts and a slow broken-steam engine beat. Side One closes with two vocal tracks: “Is There Room For All Of It” (again featuring White and Amar) has Moss singing and playing organ in a spine[1]tingling longform unison melody; the chilling title track “Galaxy Heart” calls back fractured electric guitar and droning pulse, with Moss belting out initially strangled, strident lines that give way to gently layered voicings in a cratered spaciousness these dynamics then cycling forward like the sequences of a dying star. Side Two features three superb violin études, each distinguished by Moss’ distinctively amplified violin timbres and her unique ear for the tropes of various folk traditions, interspersed with the plaintive but stately vocal song “Enduring Oceans”, and closing with “Opened Ending”, her mesmerizing contribution to Constellation’s Corona Borealis Longform Singles Series from 2020, previously released only as a digital track and short film by indie legend Jem Cohen (Fugazi’s Instrument documentary, Benjamin Smoke, Museum Hours). Galaxy Heart is cosmic music of dark matter and interstellar dust, of gravitational waves and celestial grit that connect messy terrestrial life with its human, animal, natural suffering and beauty to chaotic and unruly universal forces.

TRACK LISTING

1. Resistance Creature
2. Uncanny Being (Violin Study #2)
3. This Continuous Spectrum
4. Is There Room For All Of It
5. Galaxy Heart
6. Light Falls On Every Door
7. Uncanny Body (Violin Study #1)
8. Enduring Oceans
9. Undirected
10. Opened Ending

Jessica Moss Also Known For Her Tenure In Thee Silver Mt. Zion (2002-2015), Black Ox Orkestar (2002-2007), Recordings By Vic Chesnutt, Carla Bozulich, Arcade Fire, Basia Bulat, Roy Montgomery, Sarah Davachi, Big Brave & More. A phosphene is “the phenomenon of seeing light without light entering the eye.” The title of the heart-rending and resolute new album by composer/violinist Jessica Moss could not be better chosen. Moss is by now a seasoned practitioner of immersive isolation music; across three previously acclaimed solo records of minimal and maximal post-classicism, her acoustic, amplified, and electronically-shifted violin is the raw material for deeply expressive, palpably haunted, wholly committed compositions. But Phosphenes inscribes fleeting halos of refracted ghostly light out of a prevailing darkness with especially plangent determination and intensity. This is the most overtly searching, mournful and inexorable music Moss has made to date. The pieces on Phosphenes exquisitely navigate consonance and dissonance, building patiently from single notes to multiple voicings, harmonic stacks and clusters. These compositions channel themselves like slow-moving water in a dark cave, finding small eddies and catching glints of luminescence from within. Signal processing is kept to a minimum in the three-movement “Contemplation” suite on Side One, where Moss deploys amplification chiefly in the service of activating overtones and pitch-shifts, thickening and widening the sonics, carving out her unique timbral space. Based on a four-note sequence that sets whole tones against one another, “Contemplation” is a bona fide requiem that finds Moss at her most instrumentally naturalistic, measured, and modern. Side Two unfolds in a more foreboding vein: “Let Down” is marked by cavernous octave-dropped arco and pizzicato, providing a gothically-inflected substratum upon which hauntingly wordless vocal invocations and cumulative gyres of violin melody unfurl. “Distortion Harbour” grinds with noisier grit and a more harrowing complexion, highlighting Moss’s ambient-metal sensibility and her distinctive palette of industrial-inflected power electronics a reminder of why she’s also been a go-to player on albums by the likes of Big Brave, Oiseaux-Tempête and Zu in recent years. These two songs also feature upright bass from old friend and former bandmate Thierry Amar (Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Thee Silver Mt. Zion, Black Ox Orkestar). Album closer “Memorizing & Forgetting” is inarguably the most tender and beautiful song in Jessica’s oeuvre: a keening lullabye of sorts, on which she plays piano, violin and guitar, joined by her partner Julius Levy in a lustrous ambient vocal duet. Everyone has been trying to find a way through and out of pandemic, lockdown, social isolation and often darkened hope and for many musicians, the absence of touring, of live performance, live sound, live audiences, and a living. For Moss, it’s also been “like when you press your fists hard against your eyes and eventually there is fireworks.” The light gets in where it can, even or maybe especially as imaginative sensory simulacra (if/when we shut down our screens and are left to our own devices). Phosphenes is a stoic, acutely sensitive, superlative musical statement from Moss.

TRACK LISTING

01 Contemplation I
02 Contemplation II
03 Contemplation III
04 Let Down
05 Distortion Harbour
06 Memorizing & Forgetting