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Moor Mother (archive image from a live performance)
Photo:
Roland Owsnitzki / imago images
Album of the week:
Album cover of "Black Encyclopedia of the Air"
Photo:
ANTI records
Avant-garde musicians and pop intellectuals also have a sense of humor: "At first I wanted to call it my sell-out album, as a joke," said Camae Ayewa, aka Moor Mother, in an interview the other day, whereupon the questioner from the US magazine assured her, " Black Encyclopedia of the Air "is still sufficiently weird.
Purists who have been following Ayewa's career since the gruff, overwhelming noise of her debut »Fetish Bones« in 2016 might consider the now seventh Moor Mother album by the Philadelphia musician and poet to be a
sell-out
, an attempt to to make their hitherto strictly experimental reflection on the history of Afro-American suffering and oppression more accessible to a mass audience - by appropriating the narrative form and style of the popular hip-hop genre. But of course this album won't be a chart breaker either. Which is a shame.
Ayewa had already started using her dark speaking voice, previously often overlaid with noises, distortions and cacophonic chaos, for rap singing on her album "Brass", which she released with New York rapper Billy Woods last year. At the same time she explored modern free jazz areas with her band Irreversible Entanglements and wrote her first play with "Circuit City". The performative of these projects, together with an archive of old jazz samples and grooves, has now found its way into this encyclopedia of the air.
Together with numerous underground rappers, including indie greats like Pink Siifu or the Briton Brother May, she creates a polyphonic oral history of what it means to breathe as a person of color, often synonymous with gasping for air. The often gentle grooves, permeated by flutes and warm Fender Rhodes moods, are reminiscent of black poetry classics by Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson. Moor Mother is continuing this tradition of spoken word soul, perhaps it is here that she even shows herself to be her most accomplished and versatile contemporary artist. “Shekere”, named after the West African drum, is almost something of an alternative hit, based on popular encouragement narratives from the younger R&B and hip-hop: “Don't let it get stuck in your chest though / You gotta stretch / I shake it off, all my pain «,Gastrapper Lojii formulates a relaxation exercise under racism pressure.
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Moor Mother
Black Encyclopedia of the Air
Label: Anti / Indigo
Label: Anti / Indigo
approx. € 14.39
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But even if you can relax a little to the music of Moor Mother for the first time, the often associative, freely improvised text torn from the timeline of history, which Ayawe whispers and grumbles, still contains the same southern state and slavery horror as before, he is only packaged in a less provocative and repellent manner: "Mama made me / Tall baby / Out the guts of slavery / Grits and gravy / Shackled babies", it says in "Race Function Limited" about the hectic clattering percussion. With gentle lounge jazz, »Vera Hall« is dedicated to the black folk blues pioneer from Alabama, who was disregarded in her day. In the back part of the half-hour album, the musical structures then dissolve again, as if the "Temporal Control Of Light Echos" that Moor Mother proclaimed in the first track were gradually loosening.Past and present flow into one another again and transcend into an eternal blues that revolves around the ongoing experience of social marginalization. Tones, sounds and words in ghostly wandering tracks like "Nighthawk of Time" or "Clock Fight" actually act like echoes from the resonance space of the Black Experience that has been created over centuries. They echo through a time tunnel reaching from Africa to America, which is always a ghost train for Moor Mother, the courageous train driver of her musical "Underground Railroad".Sounds and words in ghostly drifting tracks like "Nighthawk of Time" or "Clock Fight" actually act like echoes from the resonance space of the Black Experience that has been created over centuries. They echo through a time tunnel reaching from Africa to America, which is always a ghost train for Moor Mother, the courageous train driver of her musical "Underground Railroad".Sounds and words in ghostly drifting tracks like "Nighthawk of Time" or "Clock Fight" actually act like echoes from the resonance space of the Black Experience that has been created over centuries. They echo through a time tunnel reaching from Africa to America, which is always a ghost train for Moor Mother, the courageous train driver of her musical "Underground Railroad".
"Black Encyclopedia of the Air" was a fun project for her, she says.
One suspects that it will soon become more opaque on their dramatically exciting path.
(8.5)
Listened briefly:
Rubble - "It used to be yesterday"
“Where's the euphoria?” Asked Trümmer from Hamburg in 2014 on their debut, both wet and demanding. Five years after their nervous second album, the band is now back again, this time melancholy and dignified, and maybe it's fair to say: "It used to be yesterday", also when it comes to old lyrics - and the euphoria that a band could do it after all Throwing the dismantled school desks of indie and discourse rock out of the classroom window that it just cracks. But: no. This is a well-produced and melodious album with clever, eloquent lyrics by the forever boyish singer Paul Pötsch, who in songs like "When if not" calls for people to fight everyday lethargy. But oh, the chords then shrink rather powerlessly and all too harmony,you've heard it all a thousand times. At such a low energy level, nothing becomes of the storm against the dictatorship of the conformist.
(6.0)
Luis Ake - »Love«
Luis Ake shows how you can stay attached to musical styles in the past and still generate euphoric pop music from it.
Like the soulmate Dagobert, he likes to write his songs in lonely mountain huts when his old Porsche makes the switchbacks.
On his second album he falsettles about 80s synth pop and Italo disco in a movingly impotent way about love that comes too late or dedicates a delightful rave to the never-ending "summer" of his mind.
Stuttgart Pet Shop Boy.
(7.8)
The Bevis Frond - "Little Eden"
You can also find your little paradise in the shadow of those brutalist social buildings that adorn the cover of this record, I speak from experience. It helps to carry in your ears the juvenile stormy music of British musician Nick Saloman and his mostly self-made band The Bevis Frond, which is buzzing away on furiously nagged guitar carpets, and which has hardly changed for 35 years and 27 albums . At the most, the songs that were trained on Beatles, Hendrix, Phil Lynott, folk and psychedelic rock have become a bit more grippy, gripping and compelling with advancing age; Fans of J. Mascis and Bob Mold will be very happy here too.When the 68-year-old Saloman suddenly falls into the elegiac ballad "As I Lay Down To Die" in the middle of almost 90 minutes of "Little Eden", you get a shock, but the last line of this song-monument is: "I am higher than I ever will be". Good this way.
(8.0)
Adia Victoria - "A Southern Gothic"
Like Moor Mother, South Carolina-born singer Adia Victoria also dedicates herself to Afro-American history - but on her third album, too, she starts much more traditionally, when she goes deep into the soul swamp of Southern in “Magnolia Blues” and “Deep Water Blues” -Gothic genres digs.
She has her blind Willie McTell ("You Was Born To Die") as well as the easy-going country soul of Bobby Gentry or Tony Joe White ("Far From Dixie") - all performed with a feverish, subversive voice.
The PJ Harvey of modern southern blues.
(7.5)
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