On 20 July 2024, the violinist Jessica Moss was set to perform an intimate gig at Hotel2Tango, the storied recording studio in Montreal’s Mile End district. It was a glorious summer’s day as I walked westward from the Rosemont Metro station. A short burst of afternoon rain gave way to an evening sunset which bathed the iconic 1 Van Horne building in a brilliant golden light.

I was early, so I stopped at the public gardens installed along the south side of the Van Horne overpass. Busy bees pollinated the wildflowers and a gentle stream of traffic flowed over the bridge. I turned around and was suddenly struck by a vivid double rainbow that spanned the entire horizon.

The rainbow, in addition to adorning flags symbolizing diversity and inclusivity, is also a symbol of God’s promise to mankind to never again attempt to destroy us.

“I do set my bow in the cloud,” it is written in Genesis 9:13, “and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth.” What an auspicious sign, I thought, to observe in advance of a musician whose instrument resounds, literally, by drawing a bow against its strings.

“In my mind, I don’t play an acoustic instrument,” Moss informs me 15 months later as we chat over the phone one recent morning. “I play violin and pedals. The combination is the instrument.” Behold, to adapt a phrase from R. Murray Schafer, the new orchestra.

Moss has called me from her studio in the Atlas Building on Jean Talon, a collaborative loft called Error 403 which she shares with a community of artists and musicians. Her portion of the space is crammed to the rafters with trinkets and collected curios: plastic horses and ceramic birds and doll heads and kitschy dioramas. A Mason jar-full of piano tuning pegs. A heavy glass ashtray with an array of lambs lying on their sides. Everything in Moss’s environment possesses some double meaning, it seems, an overabundance of semiotic import.

“I don’t see another way to engage with the world than the one that I do,” Moss tells me, speaking characteristically cryptically. “It’s kind of like a raw wound. But that’s how I roll.”

I have requested an audience with Moss ostensibly to learn more about her newest LP, an album entitled Unfolding, released via Constellation Records in mid-October. But our conversation meanders organically in a patchwork manner that mimics Moss’s overlapping compositions, melodic and melancholic strands of interlaced string-and-electronics arrangements that glide through your ears until they weave themselves subtly into your soul.

Jessica Moss is one of Montreal’s great collaborators, playing with Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra and the Klezmer-influenced Black Ox Orkestar, and appearing as a guest player on albums by Arcade Fire, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and the late Vic Chesnutt, among many others. Yet, over the past decade, Moss has found her footing as an uncompromising solo performer, releasing six sturdy full-length records since 2015.

“The very first time I recorded solo,” Moss explains, “I went to New York and into the basement of Guy Picciotto, who is a dear friend, and we made the cassette, Under Plastic Island, which is technically my first release. I wanted to tour but I didn’t understand that you can’t tour without making a record. So, I said, ‘fine, I’ll just record the stuff that I’m doing.’ Even from that very first moment, I realized how much I loved the technical process of working with recorded material in a collage-type way. It’s a process that I’ve used all my life, making things. It’s the artistic mode that I operate in.”

Unfolding was recorded using Moss’s distinctive montage process, starting with demos captured on her iPhone and culminating in layered strata of sounds that the engineer Radwan Ghazi Moumneh mixed into its final form.

“For me, I have various grooves,” Moss tells me. “My album-making process, even though it has evolved over the years, has kind of remained the same from the very beginning. I only go into the jam space with the intention of recording once I know that I’m in the clear to work on music for the next while, that I have time to make a record. When that happens, I get very, very into it very quickly because usually by then the concept has been boiling in my head for a long time. So, my process is improvising with a theme in mind and slowly picking apart what I’ve done and slowly creating the skeleton of what will end up being the record. All of those feel like being extreme flow states for me. Once that is done and everything is in front of me in ProTools, the pulling things together is one of my favourite things in the world, even though it is also extremely difficult and takes so long. I feel very alive doing that.”

Appropriately, Unfolding is scheduled for a month long run at Habitat Sonore, the immersive Dolby Atmos-outfitted listening room in the basement of Centre PHI. “It’s pretty exciting, that place,” Moss beams. “I just spent a week doing the Dolby Atmos mix. It’s a very special thing for me.”

Moss was raised in Toronto before relocating permanently to Montreal in her late teens. “My grandparents lived here in Montreal and my parents grew up in Montreal,” she explains. “My mother decided even before I was born that I would be having music lessons and that they would be a serious part of my life. My dad played in bands in the Communist Jewish community. There was a lot of singing and a lot of music-sharing circles. We spent summers and winters in Montreal and I knew from an early age that when I could move here I would. And I’ve never looked back. The grown-up me grew up in Montreal.”

Childhood for Moss was filled with Classical music, Jazz, and old-school Blues, until she developed her own individual tastes. “The very first obsession with music that I had was the Grateful Dead. I fucking loved the Grateful Dead. That was my first real passion.”

The earliest album she remembers buying of her own volition was Appetite for Destruction by Guns N’ Roses. “I listened to it a few years ago,” Moss recalls, “and the lyrics are fucking heinously disgusting,” punctuating this disdainful appraisal by elongating her syllables. “It was one of the many eye-opening moments of realizing as a young girl-type person the kind of misogyny that was rampant in the stuff that I listened to. Musically, you can’t go wrong. Lyrically, it’s better to not listen to the words at all.”

Quickly, Moss discovered and was influenced by the more experimental side of Grunge Rock emerging in the early 1990s. “I was in high school when Kurt Cobain died,” she says. “I remember the very day. Sonic Youth was a gateway. The Pixies were a gateway. Fugazi. The classics.”

When she absconded to Montreal in the late ‘90s, Moss found herself on the ground floor of the nascent Constellation Records scene, a cornerstone of this city’s mythology as a nucleus for underground insurgent music.

“One of my first best friends in Montreal was Ian Ilavsky,” Moss remembers. “We played in bands together. We hung out all the time. He and his mystery friend Don Wilkie from Toronto, who was planning to move to Montreal, wanted to start a venue-slash-record label. They wanted it to be called The Constellation Room. So, Don moved here, and then they were confronted with the incredibly Kafkaesque bureaucracy in Montreal with doing anything dealing with the public. They couldn’t get a venue permit no matter what they did. So, they just rented a loft and started the label and started hosting a small concert series in Old Montreal in their first location. And that experience became Constellation Records. Their first release was Ian’s band Sofa, who I was a huge fan of at the time, and I had seen every show of. That was pre-history. I was around for the whole dawn — the Don dawn,” she laughs.

In the ensuing decades, Montreal has undergone seismic political and economic shifts which have translated into a fluctuating cultural landscape.

“For a long time, it felt like Montreal was immune to the global Western world shift towards gentrification,” says Moss. “But in the last few years, what I thought could never happen here has happened here. You’ve seen it. We’re experiencing what everyone else is experiencing of being priced out, if you aren’t lucky enough to have some kind of stable living conditions. Particularly because of the rapid rise of rents here which have not matched the rise in income, what’s happening here is very violent in that way.”

Moss possesses a strong sense of social responsibility, leading by example in an abstract but tangible fashion. She is a founder member of the Montreal chapter of Musicians For Palestine and has co-organized a number of local fundraising events for the cause.

“I don’t think that I’m under any naïve illusions that there is any one thing that can affect change,” she admits. “Definitely music as a general term is too broad. But it’s one of the many tools that a community can have that can offer a space to bring like minded people together, or near-like minded people together, and have it be a situation where a group of people can leave more aligned than they entered. Or they can have this experience of sharing the energy of seeing music performed. To me, that can be a genuinely transformative experience. Having transformative experiences along with people who are working towards making change is a real thing. It’s not just entertainment. It’s a dedication to creating those spaces in the best possible way that I know, to facilitate that type of communion.”

There is an air of urgency, profundity, and gravitas to Moss’s life and work — from collecting obscure ornaments to condensing a multitude of tracks into glimmering sonic jewels that both trouble and delight. Watching Moss in her element is a masterclass in ritual reciprocity, an unforgettable experience for anyone fortunate enough to have encountered her delicate indomitability.

“I feel very committed to it being a reciprocal relationship,” she divulges. “It’s 100 percent the motivation that keeps me like a moth flying at the light.”◼︎

Jessica Moss performs 18 October 2025 at Centre PHI, 407 Rue Saint-Pierre.

_{Cover image by Audrey Cantwell.}