Canadian, Montréal-based violinist-composer Jessica Moss is known for her role in the post-rock band Silver Mt. Zion and the exploratory Jewish music band, Black Ox Orkestar, and for her distinctive voice embracing post-classical, drone, minimalism, industrial-metal, power electronics, Klezmer, and other folkways. Moss is a core member of the Montréal chapter of Musicians For Palestine, and her new album, Unfolding, is dedicated to «a free Palestine in our lifetime.» The album was produced by Radwan Ghazi Moumneh (of Jerusalem In My Heart).
The album reflects the inseparability of the personal and political, which has grown ever tighter for Moss over the past two years. Several of Moss’ closest relationships melted down over politics in the course of that year. Unfolding offers six mournful meditations, or enigmatic sonic incantations, asking for a better, peaceful, and compassionate future. The album was recorded between July 2024 and July 2025, the second full year of escalated genocide in Gaza. It is a direct response to the collective witnessing, grief, and horror, serving as a portal to collective mourning, and «as a searchlight through our internal weather systems, seeking one another out in the dark.»
Unfolding is Moss’ radical album to date. It was recorded mostly alone at Moss’ or Moumneh’s home. This approach reflects Moss’ heightened fragility and intensifies its intimate and touching emotional power. It is structured with immersive layers of melodic and textural violin, influenced by Jewish and Arabic modes, electroacoustic processing, distortion pedals, amplification, occasional voice, and percussion from Tony Buck (of The Necks) on the centerpiece piece. The painful and unsettling dronescape invocation «One, Now» ends with Moumneh calling «yell into the void». The following four urgent, elegiac, distorted ambient pieces form a four-movement work titled «no one», «no where», «no one is free», and «until all are free». This work has a strong, secular hymnal atmosphere. It is concluded with a choral of Moss’ multi-tracked vocals chanting this motivating, powerful anthem, in the hope of singing it with others in performances.
After all, Moss always viewed her work as a form of collective practice; as a way of listening, remembering, and being together. Her performances offer space for pause and attention, where grief, care, and transformation are given time to unfold.
Eyal Hareuveni
Jessica Moss (violin, vocals, synth, bass pedals, cymbal, bells, pot lids, field recordings), Tony Buck (drums), Radwan Ghazi Moumneh (vocals)
