Known for playing with County Joe McDonald, and for her experimental sound band The United States of America, Dorothy Moskowitz came back in 2023 with United States of Alchemy and their well-received release, Under an Endless Sky.

In collaboration with avant-garde composer and filmmaker Francesco Paolo Paladino, and poet and music writer Luca Chino Ferrari, Songs of Compassion is eleven songs containing subversive and at times beautiful music, and richly evocative lyrics.

Songs of Compassion has two challenges for the listener. The first is the music, called variously avant-garde, ambient, modal, non-linear, and a few more. It is played mostly on pianos mixed in and out of the foreground, sometimes doubled, and sometimes out of phase, joined by strings, woodwinds, synth washes, and steely sounds. Initially disorienting, the music serves to remind us how locked our minds are to Western notions of harmonic movement. It speaks of alternative musical narratives much older and much further away. They are songs that subvert the song: more like Steve Reich than Steve Stills; more like Phillip Glass than Phil Collins.

At the same time, there are the poetic yet strikingly contemporary lyrics. “Pale Wanderer” talks about the fact that authoritarianism needs willing accomplices, describing what happens “When you make a deal with darkness.”

“Charlottesville” (written with the late Joe Byrd) evokes the time not long ago when torch-wielding nazis, proud of the metaphoric Ns on their tunics, chanted the antisemitic tropes paraphrased in Moskowitz’s words, “We’ll be one people, pure of race/No greedy throng could take our place”. Besides the overtly political lyrics, in the tradition of 1960s protest songs, there are also thoughtful meditations on mortality and our place in the universe. The message is high-minded yet sincere and direct.

World weary and wise, Moskowitz’s voice inhabits the evocative philosophical lyrics with the authority of a skilled method actor. The melodies unfold like streams of consciousness, rising and falling, not following expected diatonic chord progressions, but honouring, instead, the value of each word. Moskowitz’s piano acts as another voice and sometimes a kind of Greek chorus commenting on the proceedings. The surrounding music frames, creates pulses and dissonances, and shimmers.

The return of Dorothy Moskowitz with her renamed project has arrived in a moment quite similar to the times that spawned its predecessor. Political division, unrest, and uncertainty always generate artistic reaction, and United States of Alchemy roared back to life with their epic 24-minute opening track “Under an Endless Sky” in 2023, serving perhaps as an “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” for our times. Songs of Compassion continues to challenge how we think about our world. It’s music that defies the song form, while doing exactly what music is supposed to do–enrich the human condition.

Find the artist online.

Further reading
Cris Derksen - The Visit (Review)
Tiny Sun - Vanishment (Review)
Maria Ka - Di Mashin (Review)

Further listening
You will find a number of Dorothy Moskowitz's works on Race The Sky, most recently on Podgrammes #022 and #019.

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