Montreal has been giving us exceptional music for a long time. Its alternative scene is big enough to have produced a wide range of internationally acclaimed acts, but close-knit enough to foster cross-pollinations and collaborations aplenty. Somewhere close to its centre is the amorphous and many-named post-rock collective usually known as Thee Silver Mt. Zion. They grew out of Montreal heavyweights Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and in turn furthered the careers of cellist Rebecca Foon (from chamber ensemble Esmerine), Eric Craven (Hangedup) and Constellation Records head honcho Ian Ilavsky. Other loose affiliates include Arcade Fire drummer Howard Bilerman and avant-garde sax wizard Colin Stetson.
For the last two decades, Jessica Moss has been central to the Mt. Zion sound (and to experimental klezmer offshoot Black Ox Orkestar). The violinist and occasional vocalist brings a pointedly modernistic and often compositional approach to post-rock, and on Unfolding, her sixth solo album since 2015 debut Under Plastic Island, she dives deeper than ever into the world of drone and longform ambient soundscapes. The album’s first side is taken up by two long tracks. The first, Washing Machine, came about as a kind of serendipitous collaboration between musician and technology: Moss, at a particularly emotionally raw period of her life, found herself sitting next to a washing machine in Europe, listening to the subtle changes of its cycles and humming her own melodic interjections. The resulting piece is intensely emotional through all its abstraction and obfuscation. There are weeping strings, distorted vocal utterances, noise and melody coexisting in a tense but arresting relationship.
The other long track, One, Now, benefits from the ever-impressive drumming of Tony Buck from Aussie legends The Necks. It moves through a range of engaging and enigmatic sounds – melancholy violins, chiming percussion, sedate bass, spooked synths – before a creeping darkness seems to envelope the whole piece, with haunting, wordless vocals and uneasy skittering of drums. It’s beautiful and at the same time slightly nightmarish.
Unfolding’s second side consists of four linked pieces (No One, No Where, No One Is Free, Until All Are Free) which together form a single work. To begin with, it is meditative, almost monastic, with gentle, exploratory violin lines playing out against field recordings of birds and water, but it doesn’t take too long before things get more feverish and distorted. It’s not an easy listen, at least in places, and nor is it meant to be. Moss employs clashing textures to evoke conflict, while the high wail of strings conjure thoughts of physical and emotional suffering. But this is, as Moss has confirmed, a piece inspired by the events in Palestine, and it is proof that ambient structures and experimental modes of expression can be explicitly political.
But Unfolding is about more than dread and suffering. Its final few minutes sees Moss give free rein to her vocals in a multitracked hymn to hope and freedom, which progresses in a slow but inexorable cascade, as moving as any church music. This choral direction is new for Moss, but she judges it perfectly, her layered vocals emerging out of the dense mass of the music and finally leaving it behind; a quite stunning way to end an accomplished and highly relevant album.
Unfolding (October 24th, 2025) Constellation