Name: Phosphenes
Brand: Jessica Moss

Bonus disc

Bonus disc: No

Catalogue number

CST161LP

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Colour

Black

Colour details

Discogs ID

Format multiplier

Download code

Download code: Yes

Rough Trade Exclusive

Rough Trade Exclusive: No

Extended format

Extended format: No

Format detail

180 Gram Vinyl with Printed Inner.

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Format Music GB

Limited edition

Release date

2021-11-19

Signed copies

Signed copies: No

Supplier GB

Cargo

Tax rate GB

Standard:20

UPC / Barcode

0666561016111

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Total Cap

1 / Extended format: No / LP / Rough Trade Exclusive: No / Signed copies: No / black

CST161CD

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Download code: No

0666561016128

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1 / CD / Extended format: No / Rough Trade Exclusive: No / Signed copies: No

Artist

Jessica Moss

Genre GB

Modern Composition

Label GB

Constellation

Distributed by <a href="http://scdistribution.com">SC Distribution</a>, Constellation has established itself as a reputable force within the music industry. The label's commitment to quality and artistic expression shines through in every release. Whether you're a fan of experimental sounds or simply appreciate boundary-pushing music, Constellation offers an unparalleled listening experience.

Discover the captivating world of Constellation today and immerse yourself in the extraordinary talent that this Canadian label has to offer.

Montreal (Canada) violinist, composer, and singer Jessica Moss has performed and recorded with a wide spectrum of ensembles over the past two decades. Best known for her fifteen-year tenure in political group Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra, she was also a founding member of avant-klezmer group Black Ox Orkestar, recorded and toured with the Vic Chesnutt band for the two albums released on Constellation, and worked extensively with Carla Bozulich’s Evangelista.
Jessica Moss has also performed and recorded as a guest with many of Montreal’s best-known artists, including Big|Brave on their acclaimed 2015 and 2017 releases on Southern Lord. She was featured in Jem Cohen’s Empires of Tin project, and joined members of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Fugazi, White Magic, and Dirty Three to perform the live score to Cohen’s film We Have An Anchor in various locations at Europe and the USA.
Similar Artists: Sarah Davachi, Automatisme, Efrim Manuel Menuck,
Esmerine,
Jerusalem in My Heart,
Silver Mt. Zion,
Ian William Craig,
Black Ox Orkestar,
Set Fire To Flames,
ALL HANDS_MAKE LIGHT,
Oiseaux-Tempête,
Horse Lords,
Godspeed You! Black Emperor

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 slowmoving 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 timbrel 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 ambientmetal 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 &amp; Forgetting” is unarguably the most tender and beautiful song in Jessica’s oeuvre: a keening lullaby of sorts, on which she plays piano, violin and guitar, joined by 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

Phosphenes

Music GB

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