Moon and Aries Turn Toward the Lights on In the Silence of the Hills

Moon and Aries have been working the long way around since 2021. Jordana Moon writes and sings from Kelowna. Tom Aries composes and produces from Cologne. The catalog already has a shape: The Becoming, The Portal and Time Travellers, each an eight-song chapter, then the twelve-track World Lounge Tour. High Noon, earlier this year, brought Peter J. Mitchell’s guitar and Hanna Marchand’s saxophone further into the frame. Losing Control closed the Canadian documentary What They Don’t Hear. In the Silence of the Hills is the fourth song from Prairie Souls, the five-song EP set for 6 November, and it is the quietest room they have opened.

People have reported a sound with the northern lights for generations, a crackle or a hiss that should not be there. The aurora sits far too high for ordinary sound to reach the ground. Acoustics research led by Unto Laine at Aalto University later placed the noise much closer, around seventy metres up, in electrical discharges along a temperature inversion, triggered by the same geomagnetic conditions that light the sky. The spectacle is remote. The shiver is local. In the Silence of the Hills behaves like that report. Jordana turns toward a sky she cannot hear, and the chill in the lyric is already in the room.

The cover understands the lag. A passenger sits in a moving car, landscape smearing past the glass, face replaced by a white line drawing of a flower with a faint cyan and magenta fringe. The body is still in transit. The drawing has already left. Under a spruce, later, the leaves are given a voice. Between those two images the song keeps its books.

All the bags going south. Words saved until tomorrow. Then the ledger: “Hotels, flights, taxi cabs, night after night.” Downtown checks. Meals with no taste. “The city life held on too tight.” The smallness arrives without decoration. “In the middle of it all I feel so small.” The chorus does not climb out of that line. It turns. High northern lights. A lonesome chill in the silence of the hills. A hiding place that stays a hiding place on the return: “I’m hidden here still.”

Tom started the piece on piano in Germany, then let analog synth textures take the melody before it crossed to Jordana for vocal and lyric. From there the song kept travelling. Classically trained cellist Zara Hudson-Kozdoj added cello from London. Peter J. Mitchell sent atmospheric guitar from Canada. Hanna Marchand, of Joko Magic, sent saxophone from Switzerland. Each player listened and answered by ear. Tom gathered the takes. Chris Kung and Francois Rocheleau mixed and mastered. No drum kit. The distance is doing that work.

What you hear first is space. A soft bed of keys, a guitar that sketches rather than strums through the lyric, pads that fill the spectrum without closing it. Jordana’s voice sits close and slightly behind a veil of reverb, warm, controlled, never pushing for a bigger room than the one she is in. The chorus opens on harmony and on her reading, not on a hit. When the vocal steps back, cello, guitar and saxophone take the sentence and pass it along. That break is the best structural decision on the track. It lets the narrative breathe without pretending a new chapter has started.

The second half is where the choice shows its limit. Verse, chorus, a return to the same temperature. “So smooth, carefree / Underneath a big spruce tree” and the leaves in a quiet breeze are lovely images, and they sit at the same height as the hotels and the flights. There is no marked bridge, no late lift, no rhythmic event that would tell you the hiding has cost something new. For a song about stepping out of a frantic ledger, the flatness is honest. It also asks a lot of a listener who has already understood the point by the first chorus. Restraint here is the identity. It is also the ceiling.

Prairie Souls is the chapter where this duo pull their cinematic electronic language toward earth, guest players, and open air. In the Silence of the Hills is the clearest statement of that turn so far. A song about arriving somewhere still, made by people who never sat in the same room to play it. The lights stay up in the sky. The chill, like those reported auroral sounds, is manufactured close to the body.