Jess Cornelius - CARE/TAKING - VINYL LP

Gord Downie - Secret Path [VINYL LP] date 12/23/2016

A phosphene is Inchthe phenomenon of seeing light without light entering the eye.Inch 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 slow-moving 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 InchContemplationInch 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 timbral space. Based on a four-note sequence that sets whole tones against one another, InchContemplationInch is a bona fide requiem that finds Moss at her most instrumentally naturalistic, measured, and modern. Side Two unfolds in a more foreboding vein InchLet DownInch 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. InchDistortion HarbourInch grinds with noisier grit and a more harrowing complexion, highlighting Moss's ambient-me

Vinyl LP pressing. 2022 from Montreal songwriter and producer Jesse Mac Cormack. In the deepest depths of the Pandemic, with a relationship in it's ending, Mac Cormack recalls sending a text to his therapist InchI'm not meeting with you every week just to hang out,Inch the bilingual musician wrote. InchJe veux que ça saigneInch-for the work to Inchbleed.Inch To mean something. The next time they met, his therapist explained InchThat message you sent me? You were really sending it to yourself. You were taking a decision.Inch That decision-to move forward, to change and have the courage to love yourself-is the journey of the past two years and also of Solo, which gleams and shivers and pulses with the heartbeat of an artist in beautiful evolution. A softer album than his debut LP Now (2019), it is nonetheless riven by the fear and flood of disappointment that marked these recent years-and the singer's childhood.