In the issue of 3 May 1982 of Libération, Serge Daney created a diagram showing different film directors in various parts of the body: Kazan, groin; DeMille, feet; Ozu, anus or bladder, etc. A year prior, as an ending paragraph of an article on Francisca by Manoel de Oliveira, he would add: What can cinema? An old man, one of the great living filmmakers, gives his answer. Maybe, he says to us, that cinema is like that body. It’s necessary that it recomposes itself, organ by organ. Down with the storyboard, down with the museum. Long live the cinema.
This article is not about cinema, nonetheless Daney’s idea of cinema like the body can also be thought of in music. Unwind, Jessica Moss last record, is placed during the “second full year of genocide in Palestine.” It is not possible then to think this album as an isolated piece of art (no piece of art is). Meditative, slow, a “direct response to our collective witnessing, our collective grief, as a portal to collective mourning, as a searchlight through our internal weather systems, seeking one another out in the dark.” This response has few words which are heard at the beginning of the album with untranslatable voices unfolding in “Washing Machine”.
Without voices now until the end of the album, “One, Now” grows with a slow, spaced, static pulse of bass concluding with Tony Buck’s uneasy drumming resembling bangs on your door at 4 am. “no one” fills me with images that I can only label as cinematic: a lighthouse on an early morning and Moss’ dancing violin barely shaded by the heavy tremble of a drone.
The first three tracks occupy half of the record’s length, whereas the remaining three tracks last only half of the duration. With “no where” and “no one is free” almost working as a single track. “no where” sounding like an eruption in a distant land smoothly transitioning to “no one if free” which works as a paranoid mind remembering a danger always present.
The last track of the record, “until all are free” works as a hopeful token: no peace will ever be completely achieved; hence, a struggle will always be necessary. At the end of the record the unintelligible and distorted voices of the beginning of the record become human, one voice (Moss’) accommodating on top of the other.
A lot has happened historically since the start of the recording of Unfolding twelve months ago. For now, Jessica Moss will be the support act for the historic last European tour of Swans’ current formation.
What can music?
Jessica Moss: Unfolding – Out 24 October 2025 (Constellation)
