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Jessica Moss

Photo by Audrey Cantwell

Discography

Jessica Moss is a violinist, composer, and solo performer based in Montréal. With over two decades of work in experimental music, she first came to prominence as a member of Thee Silver Mt. Zion and co-founder of Black Ox Orkestar. Since 2015, she has focused primarily on solo composition and performance, creating music shaped by live improvisation, deep listening, and a belief in the concert as a space for reflection and shared experience.

Moss’s solo performances are built from violin, voice, bells, loopers, and effects pedals, all operated live without pre-programmed sequences or computers. Her setup, designed by modifying equipment originally built for electric guitar, allows for dynamic shifts between stillness and intensity, melody and noise. Each performance responds to the room and its audience, unfolding slowly in real time.

Her sixth solo album, Unfolding (Constellation, October 2025), grows out of this approach. Developed over several years of touring, the album takes longform ambient structure as a starting point, using repetition and dissonance not as goals, but as part of an evolving musical logic. The record culminates in a choral piece based on the phrase “none are free until all are free,” with versions composed for both trained and community voices. A canon-style arrangement is in development for participatory performance on her upcoming European tour.

Since 2024, Moss has been part of an experimental research exchange between three Montréal-based artists and quantum physicists at the Institut Quantique (Université de Sherbrooke), led by Pia Baltazar at the Société des arts technologiques (SAT) and hosted at Quebec-based digital research center Sporobole. She’s also been working closely with PHI Centre, where she recently completed a Dolby Atmos mix of the album with sound designer Philippe Rochefort, as part of a mentorship focused on adapting Unfolding for immersive live presentation.

She premiered orchestral versions of her earlier solo works with the Novarumori Ensemble, in collaboration with composer Isak Goldschneider, and continues to explore expanded and site-specific projects. These include weave me too into the threads of your song, a collaboration with writer/musician Gabriel Levine and visual artist/printmaker Erik Ruin that draws on anarchist Yiddish poetry.

Her 2024 digital release For UNRWA was created as a fundraising effort for Palestinian relief and was later exhibited at Museo Burel in Belluno, Italy, as part of a program on art and resistance.

Moss has collaborated with Vic Chesnutt, Carla Bozulich, Guy Picciotto, Jim White, Jem Cohen, Matana Roberts, Feist, and Patti Smith. She has performed at Le Guess Who?, Donau, Big Ears, Basilica’s 24-Hour Drone, and All Tomorrow’s Parties, and toured with Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Thurston Moore, and others. In fall 2025, Moss joins Swans as the opening act on their European and UK tour in support of their album Birthing, bringing her distinctive live practice to major venues across 11 countries.

Across all her work, Moss treats music as a form of collective practice; as a way of listening, remembering, and being together. Her concerts offer space for pause and attention, where grief, care, and transformation are given time to unfold.