Release date: 19 November, 2021
Constellation Records
180gLP • CD • DL

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“A phosphene is “the phenomenon of seeing light without light entering the eye.” The title of the resolute, heart-rending 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, looped, distorted and electronically-shifted violin is the raw material for deeply expressive, palpably haunting, wholly committed longform compositions. But Phosphenes is the most incisive and inexorable music Moss has made to date, inscribing halos of refracted light out of deep solitude and hermitic darkness with especially solemn determination and intensity. These compositions channel themselves like slow-moving water in a dark cave, catching glints of luminescence from within”.
(Constellation Records)

For more info, please visit www.jessicamoss.net.

Here are a few words from Jessica:

“In spring 2020 I began a remote collaboration with sound artist and Big|Brave guitarist Mathieu Ball, where we would send each other single musical ideas and improvise separately based on those ideas, then combine the results to see what happened. One of the ideas I proposed that never got picked up in our duo work, persisted as an inspiration and became the kernel for the “Contemplation Suite” on Phosphenes:

I’d intentionally written down this note pattern without playing it or ‘hearing’ it beforehand. When I began improvising around this in the jam space, I found endless space in the note sequence to take my ‘instructions’—originally intended for a distanced collaborator—and pour all of my own emotion into them: “look for the biggest feelings of love you have for the world in here (standing in the desert + hot air blowing over you, somewhere behind you is the ocean, somewhere ahead of you there are mountains.”

I’ve always found my path towards expression through improvisation, but had never worked like this before—with a note-structure and conceptual flash-card set out in advance. As many others have similarly described, this device and restriction was creatively liberating and joyfully freeing. I followed these instructions and expanded into the intervals, letting the beauty and sadness (love!) for the world wash through me in waves”.

Press inquiries:
Lauren Barley 
lauren@rarelyunable.com

Label inquiries:
ian@cstrecords.com