Jessica Moss / Stereocilia (live at Crofter’s Rights)

Bristol
29 November 2022

Stereocilia plied an exquisite soundscape of guitar-generated ambience.

A beaming iridescence of infinite frets blooming in circling sand, layered up and waspy, later sipping some sweet subterranean gloom splattered in shivering petroleums and graining howl.

The back of the guitar’s neck sending thundery quakes on through, slowly airbrushed away on curving twilights as one track blends into another, cuts back into a cascading corrosion vulturing a modular playground. But it’s not long until the canvas is spurring back into an optical highway of epic.

The glinting jangle of that second guitar looped and over-wrought lowering itself into a setting sun full of delicate chords and transistor whorl. The blue glow of the e-bow raising up all Brian Eno-esque, quickly replaced by that frantic mirage rub of the frets that’s multi-layered until locusting a Godspeed You! Black Emperor-like shining path that finally spirals to silence – beautiful.

Jessica Moss had set up two boards of pedals surrounded by a green fairy-lit circle, the hum of the venue’s extractor fan slowly drowned out by Jessica’s looped layers of violin, her blurring fragments gently circling / over-written in improvised intercepts. Differing tones building into a whole chamber orchestra, her floor-bound switches and dials constantly in flux, bare toes dexterously adjusting the flow, re-shaping the sound as she lunges dramatically into her strings, holding on to their refracted burn.

She warmly jokes with the audience between tracks, informs us that “live” this was an improvised compilation / concentration of all her records as the short piece performed called “Fractals” quickly moved to the lengthier “Contemplation 3”. A pandemic pearl that was more melancholic, inwards-searching.

This drifting tangle of drone, full of crafted relays and blossoming colour, the decaying loops burning within, pulsating outward, falling over each other. The violin shadowing Egyptian, singing to some deep buried truth as the machines echoes staggered, delicately butterflying against the instrument’s soaring contours. It was hard to see what was real and illusion as subtle vocals were introduced, floated out in a caduceus-like helix, a demising mirror image that seamlessly spectred before drifting slowly back into silence.

The third piece — aptly entitled “Journey” — was the set showdown, ushered in by a single strum, a haunting foundation made deep and elastic. A tolling recoil filling up with sustained symphonics and seesawing dynamics. A wavering whole that constantly changed, was re-shaped, over which lullabied vocals slowly turned themselves inside out, curled as if caught in an ocean’s tidal apex.

The violin’s oily dance grabbing at a melodic sunburst, skating on the restraint / release of diamonding skin. An intimate interrogation of the soul flexing out on watery porpoise cries slowly transformed into a pack of howling wolves.

In a word — magical.

-Michael Rodham-Heaps-