Jessica Moss - Pools of Light

A Closer Listen

There is a warm solemnity to Pools of Light, like participating in a communal prayer, where hopes are a dream to ward off death, an ultimate end that is nonetheless a welcome fact of life. Inasmuch, at least, as it is the thought of ceasing to be what brings us all together – in the liner notes, Jessica Moss beautifully exclaims “FEELING LOVE IN A MELTING WORLD”. Just like her work as part of the apocalyptically-inclined A Silver Mt. Zion, this album is an interplay of hope for the hopeless and hopelessness for the hopeful, an emotional process in which the sharing of an all-encompassing pain is the relief that provides a basis to keep dreaming, to integrally act in the name of a truthful empathy that wants not to deny suffering but to heal it in communion.

The album is divided into two sections, “Entire Populations” and “Glaciers”. The former is more melodic than the latter, focusing on the immediacy of feeling, the short-duration perspective of a candle lit in the company of loved ones, an elegy for desires still wrapped in the brilliance of possibility. By the time the vocals kick in and create a contrapuntal hymn, the violin’s sound starts to seep back in as a hive of anguish, its tranquil, mournful melodies now underscored by an irresolvable tension: sadness illuminates a path that branches infinitely. “We don’t see entire populations”, the voices chant, positively multiplying a negation in the same tone, like a mental chasm before which only self-reproduction seems suitable, hearing one’s own voice over and over in order to avoid the gasping realization that we’ve already fallen from the cliff that once upon a time made us feel safe. The thing is, all of us have fallen, and therefore we all engage in that commonality, that very humanity that has the capacity to stand before death and smile, not so much in defiance, but in the knowledge that there’s always someone to your side, with whom fear starts to feel like love.

“Glaciers” is more of an ambient experiment, full of aching violin tones and modified voice clips that make it feel as though there were dozens of instruments emitting a single cry of mourning. This is not to say there’s no melody at all, but that it takes a step back into long duration, an extension of its emotional core that makes it sound like it’s deeper than the cry itself. “Glaciers” is less dramatic than “Entire Populations” because of this, but its overall slower pace lends it a gravity that crystallizes sadness into distinct facets of time passing: the imperceptibly rising sea and the slightly hotter days of centuries to come as much as the rushing floods and eyeless storms that in mere days signal the state of our planet’s future. Pools of Light is not the music of hopeful victory (that is the music of progress that happily accompanied us to the present situation), it is the music of a compassionate failure; of the realization that only in each other will we find the care and the fulfillment that our victory over nature never once provided. We’ve failed, but it is in this failure where our love can finally thrive and stop conquering. (David Murrieta)

Available here on May 5.

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Pools Of Light can be vast. 20 violins arching downward like birds diving into the sea. 10 voices in endless rounds of overlapping harmony, cutting across eachother at discordant angles. A single bowed melody flickering like a kite, anchored by bass notes that frame the flight as either liberated acrobatics or a startled and desperate bid to escape. Even at its peak of grandeur, the album never feels like the work of an ensemble. Instead, it’s a subdivision of self – a lone sentiment refracted and manipulated, feeding lyrical phonetics back into themselves, stirring whispers into their own multidirectional echoes, violins splaying outward like fingers from the same hand. As if to prove that Pools Of Light has only a single point of origin, Moss often melts the additional layers away again, with cascades of cannoning motif gradually vanishing to leave a solitary stream at the centre. Like an act of meditation, the bustle of multiple thoughts is banished to leave just a single, clearly defined notion, as crisp and essential as the quiet cycling of human breath, before the chorus of internal dialogue starts to flower open again.

Melodically, the album also undulates with the turning and overturning of internal reasoning, with bleak passages uplifted into optimism, doubted into minor keys, tempered into placid ambiences. The opening moments of “Glaciers” writhe like an oceanic storm, with voices and violins diced up by tremolo and foaming into the upper octaves, before flattening out into an exquisite major key drone speckled with overtonal sunlight. I can always hear the bow against the string, or the quiver of the throat as she sings. Even during the evocation of imagined places (the sea at dawn, the sheer glissandos of mountain ranges, deserts stirred by the wind), Jessica Moss embeds body and meaning into every crag and cloud and grain of sand. It’s an album that uses the sprawl of natural landscape – and the unfurl of a thousand violins and voices – as an analogy to the tempestuous, rich and cyclical homeostasis of human experience: surging up and down, swelling and shrinking, always returning to the centre.

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Alongside her work with TSMZMO she has contributed strings to a number of notable releases including Broken Social Scene’s Feel Good Lost, Arcade Fire’s Funeral, and Vic Chesnutt’s At The Cut. Her own music is more esoteric in nature than any of those recordings, but that’s not to say it’s inscrutable or difficult - the themes, ideas, and atmosphere are strikingly direct. Moss has said of the record, 'My music is narrative, and I feel it’s subjects are already on everyone’s mind (climate change, refugee crisis, plastic garbage island floating in the sea…)'

The album is comprised of two multi-movement pieces, ‘Entire Populations’, and ‘Glaciers’, which are both in four parts. The opener, ‘Entire Populations, Pt. I’, consists of violins that intertwine around each other in a melodic, but nonetheless slightly unsettling way. That initial discomfort is answered with the haunting multilayered chants of the following track. The lyrics equate to just one line repeated over and over: “Entire populations, oh we don’t see.” The vocal minimalism gives context and is all the more haunting and powerful for its brevity.

The dark ambience is opened out with the third part that matches tumbling electronics with sweeping string lines. The emotionally resonant acoustics contrast sharply with dispassionate machine based rumblings. And it’s a balance she maintains throughout; lending compassion to often troubling propositions. The unflinching nature of the music is saved from outright nihilism through these top line machinations.

As the record moves into the second movement, the soundscape expands. The more acute nature of the first half is transposed for sweeping brush strokes. Lyrical vocals are swapped for looped and treated incantations that sound like a mournful distressed lament. The music becomes more moodily ambient, offering a meditative starkness. Bright, crystalline violin lines fittingly evoke the glaciers of the title. In the section the pace does become a little stilted at times, dipping occasionally into the pitfalls that dog film music as it ofte relies on minimalism and repetitive motifs.

Overall, Moss has created a deeply atmospheric work that oscillates between drone led doom, and soaring optimism. It’s the kind of piece that could happily soundtrack Darren Aronofsky's forthcoming adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy if it ever sees the light of day. It mirrors Atwood's prose in that it presents a vision of a dystopia that refuses to be soulless and defeatest. The music is often troubling - as well it should be, given the context - but ultimately it is a trenchantly human record that is sweepingly cinematic in scope.