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