Who Sent You?

About

Working as Moor Mother, the Philadelphia poet and musician Camae Ayewa styles her music for sensory overload. Compressing hip-hop, punk, industrial, electronic, and noise music into a siren blare, she thrusts hundreds of years of brutal injustices in our face, as if hoping to cram as much information through as small an opening as possible. The brevity of her songs often reflects this exigency: In discussing the throttling 83 seconds of “Deadbeat Protest” (from her 2016 album Fetish Bones) during a Red Bull Music Academy lecture, Ayewa said such brevity was “to get all the information in a short amount of time.” As a member of the jazz ensemble Irreversible Entanglement, Ayewa’s approach to time has shifted. Within the expanse of the form, she knows she can convey the same urgent information at a much slower pace, allowing the group—horn players Keir Neuringer and Aquiles Navarro, bassist Luke Stewart, drummer Tcheser Holmes—to elevate her into new place. She picks her spots within the music accordingly, punctuating each of the album’s five expansive composition. Space defines the album, the band evoking our American topography, both physically and psychologically, capturing what’s in the news and what’s been repressed underneath that surface. At time, their 2017 debut album felt like a travelogue, and “The Code Noir/ Amina” continues that trajectory, with Ayewa evoking the Deep South, Holy Hill, and South Carolina. Whereas a Moor Mother song would typically clock out well before the two-minute mark, here she’s only just getting started by then, conveying a stunning image of scorched earth: “A mountain ain’t nothin but a tombstone for fire.” Stewart’s bass and Holmes’ drums keep everything at a rolling boil as the horn lines rove, expand, and Ayewa’s focus widen. She speaks of the void, the African ancestors who actually built America and died namele, then asks: “At what point do we give a shit, do we stand up and say something?” That’s not the only question she ask. The 15-minute title track begins by interrogating a beat cop, then expands to “stop and frisk” policies in general, and ultimately encompasses the sense that for most communities of color, the local police department is an occupying force at best. Ayewa, Neuringer, and Stewart first played together at a Musicians Against Police Brutality event, organized after the NYPD shot and killed Caribbean immigrant Akai Gurley, and as the band roars toward a furious climax, they even invoke Gurley’s name. Yet right at the peak, Ayewa’s voice vanishes and everything drops away to near-silence. Spare horn lines rise and evoke the eerie space of electric Mile, the mood changed entirely. Five minutes pass before she’s heard again, her voice contemplative now, speaking of a brief feeling of freedom that “tasted so good,” a joy measured in gasp. .

via Last.fm

The Clerk says

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