Staff Reviews

Jessica Moss - Entanglement

Review by William Lewis

The music captures you and doesn’t allow escape»

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For fans of Stars Of The Lid, Hildur Guonadóttir, Clarice Jensen, Christina Vantzou, Oliver Coates, Sarah Davachi, Ian William Craig and Johnny Greenwood. The second full-length solo album by violinist and sound artist Jessica Moss (Thee Silver Mt. Zion, Vic Chesnutt, Carla Bozulich). On Entanglement, her new and second album, Moss channels quantum theory as a metaphor for creating energetic connections through esoteric processes. Using violin (and occasionally, voice) as sound source, her compositions are set in motion like entangled particles –spinning, ricocheting, warping and stretching in extra-dimensional space. Particles, the magnificent 22-minute opus on Side One, is a stunning transmission of cosmos-level wonder, mystery and dread. Conjuring up sound as if from dark energy, the piece gradually humanises the void as a circling string theme develops then retracts to a single note, stretches space-time through a slowly developing drone, and clears a haunted celestial expanse for Moss to introduce hushed, keening vocal lines that layer one upon the other. Fractals on Side Two is a work in four parts that unspools through various iterations of folk-inflected phrases, played on amplified violin, sampled in real-time, and redeployed in entwined pairings, echoes and cascades. Here, Moss wields the violin with a narrative intent perhaps more commonly associated with solohorn in the jazz tradition –the power of the single melodic line, the instrument as expressive analogue to human speech and voice. Profoundly informed by the experiences of travelling alone –playing in precarious spaces preserved by passionate subcultural communities, attempting fragile, intimate, abstract transmissions through sound and performance – Moss’s new music on Entanglement invokes the striving for communication/connection in isolation, the mysterious energies that bind the singular and the universal, and the indomitably terrestrial energies that bring micro communities of people together to partake sustainably and attentively in human-scale shared experiences. This is long-attention-span music that wonderfully synthesises form and substance, spit and polish, austerity and lushness, expansiveness and intimacy.
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