Jessica Moss - Phosphenes - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

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