There are artists who compose music; and then there are artists who allow music to condense around them, like dew forming on a cold window at dawn. Jessica Moss has always belonged to the latter camp. "Unfolding", her sixth solo album and perhaps her most inward-reading one, feels like watching someone breathe through grief until breath becomes ritual, and ritual becomes transmission.

This record does not whisper, nor does it roar. It glows. It’s the glow of a votive candle in a room where someone hasn’t slept for a week but still finds the strength to sing. Moss, whose résumé stretches from the apocalyptic hymns of Thee Silver Mt. Zion to the diasporic ache of Black Ox Orkestar, has long orbited the borderlands between serenity and devastation. Here she slows her orbit. She turns it into a vigil.

“Washing Machine”, the opener, sounds almost like a private séance she inadvertently left the door open for. The metallic hums, the buried voice, the looping strings - everything sways with the stubborn rhythm of a body trying to make peace with itself. Knowing the piece began beside an actual European washer is almost too poetic to be true: heartbreak meeting household appliance astronomy, finding a scale of comfort in the drone of warm water and centrifugal force.

“One, Now”, shaped with the help of Tony Buck’s brushwork and Radwan Ghazi Moumneh’s sonic fingerprints, moves as if through fog: violin lines tracing long, aching arcs; bells flickering like memory; voices that seem to hover just above the ground, unsure whether to lament or to bless. Moss draws from Jewish and Arabic modes as if plucking threads from old garments, weaving them into something meant for a future ceremony we haven’t been invited to yet - but may desperately need.

Side Two’s four-part suite - “no one / no where / no one is free / until all are free” - is where her political and personal axes align into something unmistakably sharp. The drones become more fractured, the spaces more cavernous. And yet the message is clear: she’s not offering refuge from the world, but a listening space "inside" it, where sorrow doesn’t need translation and solidarity doesn’t need applause.

Then comes “until all are free”, the choral finale that lands like someone opening a window during a storm - not to stop it, but to acknowledge its truth. Moss multitracks her voice into a secular psalm, a protest hymn disguised as a lullaby. She sings alone, but it’s written for the day she won’t have to.

This is Moss at her most vulnerable, yes, but also at her most exacting. The album is not fragile: it’s tensile, woven from fibres that stretch without breaking. Her collaboration with Montréal’s quantum physicists suddenly feels apt - "Unfolding" behaves like music observing itself, collapsing and expanding at the listener’s touch, a wave that dares to remain a wave.

In an era where ambient often means “pleasant fog machine”, Moss offers something with stakes, with history, with pulse. She isn’t lulling; she’s testifying. And she trusts the listener enough to sit with discomfort, beauty, and the fact that the two often look like siblings.

"Unfolding" is not an escape hatch. It is a lantern. And Moss lights it not for herself, but for whoever else is still searching in the dark - for connection, for justice, for the simple proof that we are not alone.