Jessica Moss
Galaxy Heart

“Galaxy Heart is dark and strangely soothing, meditative and mesmerizing. When it ends it suddenly feels like there’s a vacuum in the room and you miss it.” - Musicworks 

“‘Enduring Oceans’ is the standout moment - a sparse, vocal-based work, it contrasts the frailty of human relationships with the unhurried pace of nature. All told, another bold and powerfully unsettling addition to the Moss catalogue.” - Electronic Sound

 “Galaxy Heart is a movie score for weary pandemic travellers, a salve for our tired bones. It’s an album that continues to bloom with each subsequent listen and will grow with you each time you return to it. Jessica Moss is not to be missed.” - Cups And Cakes

“Audibly stimulating instrumentals and creative musical motifs will provide an immersive listening experience for everyone.” - MXDWN

 “Moss continues to break her own boundaries with the beautifully titled 'Light Falls on Every Door' and 'Undirected'. Amid a backdrop of rich, otherworldly dreamscapes, these are grandiose avant-folk laments that bleed with emotion…['Opened Ending'] embodies the spirit of Galaxy Heart. The rich. The grandiose. The emotional weight. The fearless virtuosity. The meticulousness. Moss showcases all of them stridently, transcending the notions of neo-classical with something that can be considered a punk record. Galaxy Heart is all-encompassing and the record Moss has always threatened to make.” - SUN-13

 “a deep-dive rewards the listener with a sense of some ancient force surfacing through modern tools.” - Vanguard Online

 “An album untethered by earthly constraints. Its energy and emotional weight push against Moss’s self-imposed compositional limitations and explores what it feels like to let oneself loose in a celestial sea of possibilities… Galaxy Heart feels transformative for both Moss as an artist and the listener in many ways. We are voyeurs in a sense, watching and listening with bated breath as Moss breaks through barriers she never realized were there all along. Galaxy Heart is a stunning and thoroughly satisfying transformative experience.” – Dominionated

  “There is some extraordinary music here, extraordinary music that Jessica Moss created during extraordinary times, extraordinary music which will have significance long after its historical reference point has become another distant memory.” - Backseat Mafia

Galaxy Heart is the companion album to Phosphenes (released in November 2021) and completes an intensive body of work that Montreal composer-violinist Jessica Moss wrote, performed and self-produced in deep isolation throughout 2020.

As A Closer Listen wrote in its Top Ten Modern Composition list for 2021, “few musical voices represent so well the estrangement and intensity of our times; Moss is among the best of them.” Galaxy Heart consolidates this assessment, revealing the more exploratory and extemporaneous side of her profoundly expressive instrumental lyricism. Where Phosphenes showcased some of Moss’ most deliberate and accomplished post-classical compositions to date, Galaxy Heart quivers with a raw and searching energy, juxtaposing rough-hewn and honed pieces. Expanding the palette to include spiky semi-improvised electric guitar along with remotely-recorded guest contributions from drummer Jim White (Springtime, Xylouris White, Dirty Three) and contrebassist Thierry Amar (Godspeed You! Black Emperor) on a couple of tracks, the album inscribes a (mostly) instrumental space of bristling anguish, melancholia, resoluteness and conviction.

Opening with the distorted dissonant string clusters of “Resistance Creature” and the through-composed knock-out “Uncanny Being”, with White’s roiling drums and Amar’s upright bass the simmering substratum for Moss’ alternately gritty and rounded violin movements, Galaxy Heart pivots to electric guitar and sludged post-industrial drone on “This Continuous Spectrum”, a descending melodic motif recurring over doomy low-end bursts and a slow broken-steam-engine beat. Side One closes with two vocal tracks: “Is There Room For All Of It” (again featuring White and Amar) has Moss singing and playing organ in a spine-tingling longform unison melody; the chilling title track “Galaxy Heart” calls back fractured electric guitar and droning pulse, with Moss belting out initially strangled, strident lines that give way to gently layered voicings in a cratered spaciousness—these dynamics then cycling forward like the sequences of a dying star. Side Two features three superb violin  tudes, each distinguished by Moss’ distinctively amplified violin timbres and her unique ear for the tropes of various folk traditions, interspersed with the plaintive but stately vocal song “Enduring Oceans”, and closing with “Opened Ending”, her mesmerizing contribution to Constellation’s Corona Borealis Longform Singles Series from 2020, previously released only as a digital track and short film by indie legend Jem Cohen (Fugazi’s Instrument documentary, Benjamin Smoke, Museum Hours).

Galaxy Heart is cosmic music of dark matter and interstellar dust, of gravitational waves and celestial grit that connect messy terrestrial life—with its human, animal, natural suffering and beauty—to chaotic and unruly universal forces.

PACKAGING NOTES

CREDITS