In an interview with David Joez Villaverde from March 2024, Fred Moten considers crossing out the world. Building upon the writings of Brazilian philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva, he positions the pursuit of justice as requiring not just “the end of the world as we know it, or the end of the world, or this world, as such” but “the end of the very idea of world.” Less than a year later, the feeling of the end – or, at least, an end – is in the air, with Western liberal ideals of a stable existence, which only ever applied to some anyway, swiftly swept aside to the rhythm of executive orders.
While the sort of destructive accelerationism we’re witnessing is unlikely to be conducive to Moten’s interests in “the preservation of earth”, his works, past and present, seem prescient in whichever shape or form they might occupy. Crucially, his poetry – rich in references but intimate in tone – and critical works that touch upon Black radical traditions, music, aesthetics, and everything in between, provide a blueprint for navigating and surviving this new reality.
Moten’s foray into musical performance, a fairly recent development considering the length of his career, is just as essential. Although music, particularly jazz, has always been a cornerstone of his work, whether as a subject of analysis or in a more practical fashion through collaboration with composer George E. Lewis (A Recital For Terry Adkins), the past five years have seen him reimagine himself as a performer. His work alongside bassist Brandon López and drummer Gerard Cleaver, above all, proved to be a revelatory experience.
Now, Revision abbreviates the trio into a duo with López. Although the reduced ensemble might suggest a more hushed or timid outing at first glance, if anything, the opposite is true. From start to finish, the record finds the duo engaged in an absolutely emphatic, relentless dialogue. Moten’s poems pulsate in the rhythm of López’s tight plucks and vamps, then force them to dissipate into screeching bowed lines. Simultaneously, the music keeps alive the spirit of collaboration and intellectual fervour that evolved through their previous collaborations.
As the story goes, Moten, López, and Cleaver first performed together in 2019 at New York’s Vision Festival. Then, they reunited in 2020, during the global pandemic and in the immediate aftermath of the George Floyd rebellion, to record their first, self-titled album. Its follow-up, 2024’s the blacksmiths, the flowers, collected two live shows that the trio performed at 411 Kent in Brooklyn in the summer of 2023. While the two albums draw from the same fundamental principles, with Moten’s compelling words and poetic agency both a driving force and passenger behind Cleaver and López’s improvisations, the live recordings had already shown signs of a group growing and transforming, three individuals coalescing into a cohesive unit. Revision further distills this dialect.
‘#14’ opens the album with one of López’s insistent, swaying staccatos, the percussive character of the string’s leading edges punctuating Moten’s words. “The pitch in time of looters, Harriet plus Harriet plus sound plus the pitch in time of looters all the way across,” he intones with melancholy swagger. With no suggestive title tracks to latch on to and the ambiguous literary composition, meanings become more difficult to grasp, but their presence is overwhelming, seeping through each track. Hermetic, but not abstract. Referential, yet deeply personal.
While Moten’s theoretical works play into this poetry, more than ever he seems interested in questioning rather than answering, drawing the listener into an active role. Like the prophecies of the oracles of Dodona, each playthrough reconfigures syntax into new substance. In the piece’s dying moments, the stability of the rhythm falls apart, López’s tones appear to grow wider, and the cadence of Moten’s delivery follows suit. Stanzas lose their boundaries as they attain an intrinsic sense of musicality, while inner rhythms emerge from repeated utterances and sentences with no endings. Narration disappears while López continues humming in the background.
As Moten reveals in the interview with Villaverde, the discontent with his performance on the first recordings with López and Cleaver emerged from his inability to listen and read simultaneously. “I’m not responding to them very much at all, not much. I wanted to, but I didn’t know how to,” he says, singling out the long instrumental stretches of the album. Since then, Moten has worked on adapting his poetry for the format, likening his newly refactored pieces to graphical scores.
The effects of this approach are evident throughout Revisions. Moten steps out of his comfort zone to deliver lines with the confidence of a seasoned thespian, then lets them dance across bass thwacks, twisting them into expressive croon, elongating their syllables, grunting, vocalizing, and scatting. His inflection adapts in response to the bass’s dance and branches out the meaning of his phrases. The subtle call and response of his voice with López’s notes is often intoxicating; the absence of drums enables a leaner, more elegant flow.
On ‘#5’, the LP’s longest cut at fourteen minutes, López uses his upright bass as a percussive instrument, his fingers drumming out a nervous rhythm on its body. Meanwhile, Moten weaves together a crushing sequence of messages. “The universal machine requires a mechanics of flesh so the quantum anomalies can be followed.” He articulates these words with fiery conviction. His choice of vocabulary suggests a kinship with the engaged science fiction poetics of Camae Ayewa, counterpointed and underscored by a shift into bittersweet singsong: “That’s what we’ll always be, inseparable.”
Meanwhile, ‘#4’ reuses Moten’s poem whatnot the music as an investigation of the appropriation and commodification of all Black music. “My favorite things fight concertization, concertization is like conceptualization only tighter, it wants to be concretization, like a piece for four hands, three of which can’t tremor,” he presses against a growling riff, bringing to mind the discourse of Edward O Bland’s 1959 film The Cry Of Jazz. Later, he refines wordplay into existential misery, making “our model for remote intimacy and ritual is missile” stand uncomfortably close to “through our beautifully imagined children, nearly miss each other,” before unwrapping an unlikely, acerbic rendition of the “gitchie, gitchie, ya-ya, da-da” refrain from 2001’s ‘Lady Marmalade’.
As the album unfolds, López moves from conjuring swallowing drones and piling grooving vamps upon each other to intense walking lines and nervously bowed licks. Moten alternately follows and guides, as the past mixes with the present on a level playing field and pop-culture tropes make way for reflections on Palestine through empathetic eyes. Recollections of the first intifada co-exist with thoughts on “drip choreography”. There’s humour to it all but perpetually accompanied by an uncomfortable heaviness.
Once the initial shock of Trump’s second presidency wore off, Black voices across social media shared a common sentiment: we have endured worse and we will endure again. The question arises – did anything truly change, aside from how openly certain ideas are presented? Moten’s research on the resilience of Black people in the face of severe social conditions holds vital answers. While only implicitly related to his theoretical works, Revision extends beyond just music and becomes a reinforcement of these thoughts. It is not quite a call to arms, but rather an urgent invitation to reconsider our world.
