Moor Mother—Black Encyclopedia of the Air

Black Encyclopedia of the Air finds Philadelphia performance poet Moor Mother (Camae Ayewa) surrounded by uncustomarily restrained accompaniment. Where Ayewa’s previous albums spat in the face of their listeners—at times pulling at the fringes of noise music—Black Encyclopedia hushes things up; gargles with potential energy.

This may sound like a defanging. It’s not. If anything, Ayewa’s confrontational performance is vitalized by the vacuum which surrounds it. Writing is one thing—delivery altogether another. To my mind greatest compliment an artist can receieve, which is certainly true in Ayewa’s case, is that no-one else could deliver their material. Moor Mother is a singular voice in every sense of the word.

Its's not the first time a more subdued approach has appeared this year. Recently, Rhode Island noise musician Lingua Ignota stripped things back for her album Get Ready Sinner. As an unfortunate side-effect, the lyrical and thematic one-dimensionality of that album’s lyrics stumbled into unavoidable relief. The opposite is true here; Ayewa is a considered, thoughtful and fantastically intelligent lyricist whose work only reveals greater riches the closer we scrutinse.

But Ayewa is not the only voice on Black Enclyclopedia. Unfamiliar voices explore unfamiliar territory and give this album a broader perspective than had Ayewa, skilled as she is, chosen to make it a one-woman show. These guest performances, which feature on around half of the album’s tracks, are cannily used. You never know what to expect: features range from sweet, melodic vocal hooks to jittery verses exploring lockdown paranoia and sinister governmental duplicity.

The most persistent motif of Moor Mother’s work—a gathering together of history, a collision and entanglement of past and future—is just as present here as it was on her stunning debut Fetish Bones. What truly impresses, though, is her ability to explore this concept from so many angles; to so consistently refresh and defamiliarise a theme, to the extent it feels unprecedented every time.

Black Encyclopedia of the Air is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

Baxter Dury—The Night Chancers

In the recently-released video for Baxter Dury’s ‘I’m Not Your Dog’—the song which opens The Night Chancers—Dury staggers across a deserted beach, weak and bleeding at the end of some vicious pursuit. Dury’s detractors would say he was hounded by the legacy of his father Ian. For some, Baxter still labours under that long shadow—styled to the nines to hide a deep abdominal rupture; a weakness, or literal lack of guts.

In fact, Baxter isn’t hiding anything. The Night Chancers is peppered throughout with wilful self-denigration, dismantling its own geezerish image in real-time. The album’s title track alternates recordings of a dog’s powerful bark and pathetic whimper. The Night Chancers is powerful precisely because it is wounded; naked.

There’s even space for queerness. ‘Samurai’ is a sexually-charged song with a potluck of pipe-climbing, sword-swinging imagery. The object of desire isn’t a damsel—it’s a fierce warrior. Again, Ian got there first (with ‘Superman’s Big Sister’—a kind of cuck-y, submissive fantasy which trembles at the power of the woman it’s describing). But this kind of thing didn’t start or end with Ian—it’s always been endemic in disco and funk, like it or not.

The path cleft by Baxter—droll spoken-word bouncing on minimalistic grooves—is close to Ian’s, albeit only superficially. It tells you something that ‘I’m Not Your Dog’ is compared just as often to Serge Gainsbourg or the Pet Shop Boys. And sure, Baxter inhabits different characters and personas across this LP, too; another fundament of his father’s work. ‘I’m Not Your Dog’ tells us, “I’m not your fucking friend,” before ‘Saliva Hog’ addresses us as “friend” about fifty times a couple of tracks later. But these perspectives and pieces are glued together by Baxter’s—not Ian’s style. A style all to its own. And that’s more than enough. Underneath our suits and shirts and skin everyone is the same bright red—it’s how we wear ourselves that defines us.

The Night Chancers is available for purchase here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

Moor Mother — Analog Fluids of Sonic Black Holes

With 2016’s Fetish Bones, Moor Mother (Camae Ayewa) announced herself as a radical experimental musician. At once worldly and otherworldly, Fetish Bones dragged listeners through the corpse of history. It picked up noise, field recordings and spoken word passages along the way. It ruffled feathers, rankled as many as it thrilled, but left no listener untouched. Analog Fluids of Sonic Black Holes is a refinement and refocusing of its thematic and compositional qualities.

Ayewa’s ideas are still desperate — so is the world — but they coalesce into a more coherent argument than before. And Analog Fluids is as much a compositional patchwork as any of her previous work. In its scattered form, the album is something like Tanya Tagaq’s Retribution. Noise elements screech over conjurations, chants, and spoken-word polemic. But these contrasting elements produce a compelling whole, rather than a busy mess.

Analog Fluids is a set of dissonant sketches which dissect history in all its deathly weight. Moor Mother’s conceit of time travel is her ace-in-the-hole. She collides afrofuturism with the brutal past that necessitated it; the cold earth it grew from. By casting herself, a black American, as time-traveller, Ayewa asks the uncomfortable question: where can I go? And, if the past informs the future — what future do I have?

‘The Myth Hold Weight’ is the centrepiece of Analog Fluids, smashing the past into a present which mirrors its cruelty. Grains of modernity, sloganeering and dark comedy recall Gil Scott-Heron's 'The Revolution...'. This throwback style gains prescience when you remember that in Moor Mother’s world, nothing is new. The cruelty of the past is repeated by the present, because cruelty lies in the modern world’s foundation. When it all ends, Moor Mother will already know what’s coming.

Analog Fluids of Sonic Black Holes is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe

Jenny Hval — The Practice of Love

Jenny Hval's albums are often like manifestos. Her free-verse lyrics, on a page, read like paragraphs of some pontificating, noncommittal dissertation. But Hval's delivery has always granted them magic. A wave of sensuality crushes all that is ostentatious in her work.

She is the hub that houses her own spokes, the point at which all her antithetical ideas collide. In anyone else's hands, her material would be treading on its own toes. But she has a knack for carrying it all off. Hval, if not an intellectual, has always been a juggler of ideas.

And in recent years, Hval the songwriter has come to the fore. With last year's The Long Sleep, she released 'Spells' — her most warm and welcoming track to date. The EP as a whole represented Hval's most successful marriage of concept and material, seizing the mantle from its vampiric predecessor Blood Bitch. It even found space for one of her trademark spoken-word sections in a touching coda.

The Practice of Love further emphasises this talent for songwriting. Eschewing extended drones and sound collages, it instead unveils hit after hit of electro-inflected art-pop. Hval has also drawn in a crew of collaborators, most notably the striking and powerful vocals of Vivian Wang. Hval’s now-fragmented voice swells the album beyond vanity-project-chinstroking, and into cabbalistic beauty.

But things haven't leapt completely off-world. Hval's admirable, slightly clumsy, directness is still present. Discussion is sometimes so frank it touches embarrassment — like overhearing arguments or sex through the wall. She is an artist who can make you blush, shake your head in confusion and laugh while being overwhelmed by beauty.

On The Practice of Love, Hval says she took influence from 'trashy, mainstream trance music from the 90s'. But this album adopts the spectre of vaporwave, and contorts its influences into something full of yearning. The ancient, artifacted JPEGs; the jumble of disconnected visual noise. It has the airiness and wonder of nostalgia, but feels fiercely contemporary.

Hval probes further into herself with every release, exploring, revealing, peeling back layers of identity to find new masks beneath. And after every internal expedition, she returns with a greater treasure. The Practice of Love is her greatest yet.

The Practice of Love is released on Sept. 13th. Pre-order the album and stream its singles here.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe