Moor Mother, the project of Philadelphia's queer Black poet and singer-songwriter Camae Ayewa,
co-founder in 2014
with Rasheedah Phillips (a fellow queer Black woman)
of
the literary and artistic collective
Black Quantum Futurism,
debuted with
the eleven-song minialbum Manufacture Of Indigo (self, 2015),
a parade of brief sketches of singalong and percussive street music
(Whip Hoe and Sword,
Loves Revenge More Than His Children)
and psychedelic mantras (Blackstartrek Light Escape EP 01).
It also includes the tribal eight-minute funk-jazz jam Georgia+Mass, which samples Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders.
who is a purveyor of "Afrofuturism" with her co-conspirator Rasheedah Phillips of the Community Futures Lab,
Fetish Bones (2016) as
a sort of Patti Smith of
glitch electronica.
Songs like Creation Myth and Cabrini Green x Natasha Mkenna are jarring collages of free-jazz percussion, samples, electronic distortion and militant poetry.
The album's emotional power peaks in the
pounding rage of Deadbeat Protest and the
ear-splitting grating and chirping sounds of KBGK.
There are brief incursions in
tribal blues (Chain Gang Quantum Blues),
dance music (Tell Me About It),
industrial music (Washington Park)
and so on,
all derailed by chaotic electronic arrangements.
Moor Mother is also a member of the spoken-word group Irreversible Entanglements (2017).
The Motionless Present (2017) collects poems and music.
Analog Fluids of Sonic Black Holes (2019)
continues the irrational project of Fetish Bones (2016), but it is
mostly devoted to
one-minute electronic gags like Engineered Uncertainty, Master's Clock, Sonic Black Holes.
Longer pieces like Shadowgrams and Passing of Time fail to find an exciting soundscape for the lyrics.
After Images, a collaboration with Justin Broadrick of Godflesh, and Black Flight intone variations on the tribal dance.
Only one piece is truly genius:
a simple relentless beat and sardonic vocals create the terror atmosphere of Don't Die.
Circuit City (Don Giovanni, 2020) documents her first theatrical work,
Accompanied by vocalist Elon Battle, electronic musician Steve Montenegro, trumpeter Aquiles, bassist Luke Stewart, saxophonist Keir Neuringer and percussionist Tcheser Holmes,
Ayewa blurts out her lines over feverish instrumental improvisation.
The music of the eleven-minute Act 1 - Working Machine echoes
the psychedelic free-jazz of Robert Wyatt
coupled with the bubbling and distorted electronica of Morton Subotnick in a crescendo of chaotic chatter.
Act 2 - Circuit Break is more abstract and neurotic, with frantic drumming puncturing the saxophone's intoxicated maze of reverbs. As the saxophone
launches in desperate glissandoes, one wishes that an apt vocalist would engage
in a duet.
Elon Battle's vocals lead in fact Act 3 - Time Of No Time, drenched in an
oneiric atmosphere of liquefying keyboard tones and tapping drumsticks
The music cacophonically implodes at the beginning of the 13-minute Act 4 - No More Wires and then becomes an exhausting bacchanal before relaxing
in a turbulent anticlimactic coda.
The drawback for Ayewa is, of course, that the music steals the show, and her
declamations don't add but detract from what would be top-notch jazz improvisation.
Moor Mother collaborated with
rapper Billy Woods of Armand Hammer
on Brass (2020) with help from several friends, an album
of 15 brief duets.
The soundscapes of rapping duets like Furies (against the backdrop of a ghoulish choir) and Gang for a Day (ominous drones and sound effects) are
haunting even though not fully developed.
Maroons returns to the psychedelic free-jazz feeling of Circuit City with the addition of an echo of African swamps, and Chimney wraps
the story into
a ghostly fanfare led by
warped flute calls.
The voices create a sense of tension and disorientation in Arkeology
over the cascading wooden percussion
and a sense of macabre and funereal in Scary Hours (with John Forte) against a symphonic background.
Guest vocalists craft the lightweight neosoul of The Blues Remembers Everything over a swampy percussive fest.
Black Encyclopedia of the Air (Anti, 2021) is a more stripped-down
effort, and can hardly be called "hip-hop": her rapping is
basically spoken-word poetry, and the beats are often fairly trivial.
The musical scaffolding can nonetheless be intriguing, like
the Afro-jazz instrumental base of Mangrove or
the petulant classical-sounding violin
which counterpoints the two male rappers of Shekere.
The zombie singalong Obsidian has traces of funk music in its intricate beat.
The haunting Iso Fonk and the drunk Rogue Waves swim in psychedelic space-jazz. The somnolent and disjointed Tarot camps in that space, and that's the best that the album can offer.
Jazz Codes (2022) is not a jazz tribute but another cauldron of jazz, blues, soul, hip-hop, electronics and poetry. It stands as a concept about
the historical influence of jazz on African-American culture.
The album is more fragmented than usual (18 songs), and the songs cover a broad range in terms of quality, from bland recitation
to intellectual challenge
(the psychedelic space-jazz of Meditation Rag,
the Albert Ayler-esque April 7th,
the catatonic blues of So Sweet Amina
the ominous agonizing Blues Away).
700 Bliss, a collaboration with fellow female Philadelphia dj Zubeyda "DJ Haram" Muzeyyen, debuted with the five-song EP Spa 700 (2018) that contains
the absurdist pseudo-rap theater of Basic, the
cubistic polyrhythm of Cosmic Shop and the angry-solemn
agit-prop rant Scully.
each arranged with synth and chamber instruments, each derailed (rather than
enhanced) by childish lo-fi beats.
Four years later 700 Bliss released the album Nothing To Declare (2022),
a set of brief avant-rap vignettes.
Occasionally they flirt with
more conventional rap (Nothing To Declare and Candace Parker)
but in general they remain stubbornly leftfield.
The watery agony Totally Spies,
the dislocated African chant and dance Nightflame,
the stoned recitation over pulsating Caribbean techno Anthology,
the bombastic electronics of More Victories,
the chaotic chatter and glitchy background of Seven,
and so on
paint the fresco of a collective psychological disaster.
The album is however too long, with
too much filler; and too many songs feel unfinished.
The mini-album
Clepsydra (2020) contains abstract soundscapes bordering
on sound collage meant as background music for
writers.
The mediocre
True Opera (Don Giovanni, 2021), another short album,
was a collaboration with
Mental Jewelry, aka
Philadelphia
rocker
Steven Montenegro.
Instead of hip-hop, the album delivers
the psychobilly True Opera,
the atonal rave-up Look Alive,
the hard-rock epilepsy of Eugenics
and the power-pop litany Shadow,
songs that hark back to the New Wave of four decades earlier.
The Great Bailout (Anti, 2024) is a historical concept (almost a rock opera, except that there is no "rock") about the abolition of slavery by the British Empire. The instrumental base mostly consists of abstract, beat-less chamber music.
The ten-minute opener Guilty contrasts angelic female singer (Raia Was) with stentorian male singer (Lonnie Holley) over neoclassical strings and harp.
The dynamic interaction between the two voices is at the core of the tragic crescendo of the denunciation All The Money.
The nine-minute South Sea is a lengthy duet between Camae Ayewa's recitation and Angel Bat Dawid's clarinet improvisation with a barely whispered droning organ casting a shadow midway into the piece.
Lugubrious ambient sounds envelop sarcastic speeches such as Compensated Emancipation.
An industrial beat and soulful female vocals underpin the recitation of Liverpool Wins.
The musical peak is the violent chopped-up sound collage Death By Longitude.
The album is a successful work in the spoken-word genre.
The Film (2025) was
a collaborative with Canadian metal band Sumac.
