“I could practice as long as I wanted and obsess over the tiniest details”. Jessica Moss explains to Julian Marszalek in issue 164 from PROG Magazine in the All Around the World article on page 20, Jessica herself has shown that she can spread her wings and fly across the Canadian landscape by taking her arrangements a step further with electronical boundaries that can cut you like a knife.
Moss has been around for 30 years, starting out with the alt-rock group Fidget, followed by playing with the Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra and Tra-La-La Band, Black Ox Orkestar, and appearing on albums for bands such as Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Broken Social Scene, Arcade Fire, Vitamin String Quartet, and Daniel O’Sullivan to name a few. She has come a long way to prove that she’s more than just a band member.
But with her trusty violin, she knows how to create these intense arrangements which is quite evidential on her latest album Unfolding. Following it up to her 2022 album Galaxy Heart, Unfolding can be at times unsettling, unpleasant, but all in all, a trip into the unknown.
According to the article that Julian wrote about her in PROG Magazine, Moss’ music is built through improvisation inspired by political upheavals and conflicts, then layered into this dense, emotional landscapes. “I create the palette through improvisation”, she explains to him, “And then paint with it. The narrative tells me what to do while I’m working on it”.
And for Unfolding, she paints the portraits to life with this beautiful ambient, lushful, yet moody landscape and the dystopian nightmare that’s unfolding in front of our very eyes.
Moss is very much like a storyteller, bringing each compositions such as ‘No One’ with its droning, foghorn-menace, and sounds of crystals dinging through the night-time sky, the deafening terror on ‘No Where’ where she sends shivers down your spine, creating this city, think of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, where the city is on the brink of collapse and the townsfolk are prepared to start a war and take down the emperor whose gone completely mad.
She even throws in the Berlin School of Music into the frame of her scores. Think of a mixture between Ash Ra Tempel’s Manuel Gottsching, Klaus Schulze, Tony Conrad’s team-up with Faust, and Popol Vuh, with Peter Gabriel leading the way during the Passion-era from The Last Temptation of Christ. She gets exactly on where she puts the arrangements into her music. Not to mention her team-up with Australian percussionist Tony Buck from the Necks, lending Moss a helping hand on the middle-eastern improvisations behind ‘One, Now’.
As I’ve mentioned before, Unfolding is an unpleasant album, but it is a challenge for anyone who enters into Moss’ parallel universe, detailing this Goyaesque scenery she has brought into the forefront when it comes to nightmarish imagery, and the terror that the landscape has unfolded. And believe me, once you open the door to Moss’ territory, it’ll be a roller-coaster ride, you’ll never forget.
