From the opening moments of Unfolding, the voice of Jessica Moss’ violin is unmistakable from her work with Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra. Built entirely from violin, effects pedals, hand bells and very occasional vocals, Unfolding somehow reaches a comparable size to the vast architecture of Swans or Sunn O))) without drums or guitars.

Washing Machine opens hovering like a bird before her voice enters muffled and distorted, accompanied by a sudden blossoming of low strings landing with immense weight. This may be drone music, but it’s not ambient background noise. It’s far too intense and physical, as Moss tugs relentlessly with vibrato to communicate her emotions with devastating clarity.

Throughout Unfolding, Moss weaves together musical languages drawn from both Jewish klezmer traditions and Middle Eastern modal scales, folding them into one another to weave a profound response to the grief, horror, and helplessness she feels around Palestine and her own Jewish heritage, using musical convergence to speak to oneness and shared humanity. The closing track until all are free repeats the mantra “No one, nowhere, no one is free until all are free” shifting melodies with each repetition to become less of a statement and more of a collective ritual that’s steady and consoling.

One, Now is the strikingly sparse emotional pillar, built around silence as much as sound and using chiming hand bells to create a vast sense of spatial depth, whilst no where uses rapid bowing and a storm of tremolo to summon images of enormous, turbulent weather gathering overhead. Moss’ ability to communicate without words is extraordinary. You always know when she’s grieving, and when she’s cautiously hopeful.

Unfolding isn’t punishing, even when it gets loud and emotionally overwhelming. The record is deeply comforting despite its tension and sorrow. This is modern classical, post-rock and drone music converging into something both personal and political, that provides real solace for anyone feeling overwhelmed by the state of the world. Ending on that quiet mantra feels like an insistence and a reminder that there are more people who want the violence to end than want to perpetrate it. The repetition affirms the inevitability that history does not stand still forever. We’re trapped watching something unbearable, but nothing is permanent.

Music like this will appear too dark to people who are content staying anaesthetised by pop culture and streaming platforms, but to those of us who insist on engaging with the real world and don’t see art as a distraction, Unfolding is neither strange nor bleak. There’s tremendous value in art like this that refuses to look away. With a vast use of space and a willingness to sit inside tension rather than resolve it, Unfolding is a refusal to let the horrors around us dissolve into background noise. Conjured almost entirely from violin and a small constellation of effects pedals, Jessica Moss can summon vast worlds completely on her own, and it’s staggering to hear.

Read our interview with Jessica Moss here.