Can I set up multiple backend connections to a single server for message-based load balancing

In my particular case, the server-side connection is going to a node that belongs to a tightly-coupled cluster. This node performs its own connection load balancing between all members of the cluster. So a single server-side connection is only established with one of the cluster nodes. If I were able to force multiple server-side connections then I could make use of all (or at least more) of the cluster nodes.

In a simpler case, it's reasonable that a multi-threaded server might have improved performance by servicing incoming messages over multiple connections vs. just one.