With Unfolding (out October 24th), Montréal violinist and composer Jessica Moss pivots toward something quieter yet no less intense — a record that trades her usual orchestral gravitas for a slow-burning kind of transcendence. The newly released centerpiece, “One, Now”, stretches over thirteen minutes and feels less like a song than an act of invocation.
Built around a skeletal pulse of bass and chime, the piece gradually unravels into a dronesphere of violin loops, murmured voices, and spectral noise, as Tony Buck (of The Necks) supplies fluid, brushwork percussion that sounds almost geological — the rhythm of erosion, not propulsion.
Moss, formerly of Silver Mt. Zion and Black Ox Orkestar, has long inhabited the borderlands between lament and resistance. Here, she channels that duality into a meditation on persistence — music that mourns but refuses stillness. The modal violin lines, steeped in Jewish and Arabic tonalities, drift into abstraction until the boundaries between composition and improvisation dissolve entirely.
Unfolding isn’t ambient in the passive sense; it’s ambient as confrontation — a record that demands patience, attention, and surrender. “One, Now” is its dark heart: fragile, deliberate, and glowing faintly like an ember that refuses to die.
Listen below.
