The audiences of 20th century music were often split by genre into cliques and factions. Of all the concepts around music, the 21st century seems to have ditched that quicker than a Trump tariff. Few artists embody the comprehensive breadth of genre-less music as masterfully as Moor Mother.
Her solo releases are rich and inventive, yet it’s her eclectic collaborations which best reveal her intentions. She’s recorded albums with underground rapper extraordinaire billy woods, and industrial dub as Zonal with The Bug and Justin Broadrick. Her free jazz work with Irreversible Entanglements is among the finest released by International Anthem, whilst 700 Bliss, her project with DJ Haram, brings hyper pop elements into woozy electronics. And just last month, during her two-day Café OTO residency, she collaborated with Pat Thomas and Imani Mason Jordan for a layered vocal performance of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower before hooking up with Shovel Dance Collective and Elaine Mitchener the following night to summon Armageddon in an intense rendition of the Book of Revelations.
It makes sense that her next link up would be with the post-metal improvisational outfit SUMAC. Her family is expanding.
The word count of this review could be used a hundred times over solely discussing Moor Mother’s poetic prowess. I’ll have to trust that, for the betterment of humanity, deserving tomes will be dedicated to her written work, and settle here for pulling out a few of The Film’s choice cuts. There’s ‘Camera’s confessional “You don’t know what it’s like, I don’t know what else to write”, traditional evocations of fellow sonic voyagers, in this case GZA’s “Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth” and “Sly Stone falling from the sky”, the no-nonsense of “America pissed and shit itself. No diaper” and the alarmingly explosive “Seems like every time there’s a bomb there’s a round of applause.”
She’s at her most vociferous when painting with pyrotechnics. Dropping soft-kissed grenades of devastating truth. And pyrotechnics are precisely what SUMAC bring to the equation. The guitars blare like fire alarms on ‘Scene 2: The Run’ before resolving into a sludge bloodbath of towering riffs with spasmodic piston drums and Aaron Turner’s scorched earth bellow gulping up the remaining headspace. Taking it even further, ‘Camera’ is a detonation of drums careening from ecstatic bursts and rapid fire hi-hat shots to rolling toms and snare collapses. It is the spirit of Haino, of Brötzmann, of Milford Graves, unleashed on Sunn O))) amps. It’s a Free Metal apocalypse, unshackled from the confines of structure, hooks, riffs, melody, rhythm, or song. The sounds bulge into view like a spontaneous eruption hailing from the combined psyches and souls of these four electric performers.
It’s an overdone cliché to soundtrack an imaginary film. Yet here the question seems to be: What if reality is what’s being soundtracked and we’re left praying that it’s only a film? Just as it’s often repeated that serious science fiction is written about the present rather than the future; this cinematic soundtrack seems reflective of contemporary reality much more than an invented narrative.
And what better encapsulation of 2025 than the majestic, 16-minute, elegant fist that is The Film’s closing track. It kicks straight in. No threats. No insinuations. All business. Moor Mother utters “I need a moment” as the tension builds to an epic point with the guitars twirling for their lives on terraformed mountaintops as the rhythm section motors through the planet’s core in a race against time, and Moor Mother heartbreakingly incants “I pray the tides go” in a fit of furious despair.
With wrecked bells jangling like chains and heaved bass notes stretching out as far as the ear can hear, the unspooling drums head towards full collapse. Amongst the rubble lies the suggestion of surveying the Earth from a distance. A post-accelerationist, Afrofuturist vision of off-planet sanctity.
During ‘Scene 3’, Moor Mother proclaims, “They dropped an atomic bomb on our memories.” Those blasted recollections return in a vision during the finale as she recalls various “memories from planet Earth”. A fresh start. A coda to The Film. Hopefully imagined but not yet believed.
