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

GFOTY — GFOTV

GFOTV, the latest album from GFOTY (and the first since her departure from label PC Music) finds the shackles loosened. Whether it's a refreshing course-correction or dismal fall from grace is in the eye of the beholder.

For better or worse, no artist so embodied PC Music as GFOTY. Her disruptive disassembly of pop music tropes always pushed things further and harder than any of her labelmates — sometimes past the point of what PC’s audiences found palatable. Her playground was the profane and the excessive. While there was no evidence of compromise in her work for PC, it’s clear that GFOTY felt a new direction was necessary. So — what grand statement has this newfound freedom permitted?

GFOTV is a collection of skits which describe TV shows from the late 90s to early 00s. Descriptions are at the most superficial level — often to the point of listing characters by name. GFOTY will on occasion offer an opinion like, ‘This TV show is good, dun dun dun,’ or, in the case of the Bananas in Pyjamas-themed ‘EDIBLE BROTHERS’, ‘This show / It has / A really high concept.' If this all sounds a little arch, that’s because it is. But it’s so shot through with sardonic humour, it's so confrontationally low-effort, that you don’t want to rise to the bait.

GFOTV is antagonistic from an aesthetic standpoint too. It’s horribly mixed and monotonous. At only twelve minutes long, at points the album feels like it’s never going to end. The question arises; ‘what is this doing beyond trolling the listener?' PC has a reputation for acts which are so cutting-edge they feel like they’re from the future. But this kind of dry cynicism is straight from the days of rage comics.

To play devil’s advocate, let's argue this album isn’t as conceptually thin as it seems. GFOTY describes shows which likely occupied her fanbase’s childhoods, but muscles nostalgia out of the room completely. There is no sentiment or love; just disinterest. It’s like revisiting an old memory to hear, ‘that never happened,’ finding out it’s manufactured; hollow. There’s something unsettling which is difficult to pinpoint. And as signified by the spooky test card clown of its cover, it’s something GFOTV seems fully aware of.

GFOTV is available to purchase and stream here. All proceeds from purchases to charity Mind.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe

The Keep — Primer

On Primer, Gothenburg musician The Keep shares stylistic trappings with the early cinema of Michael Mann. The cover of Primer depicts an apartment collaged from sources which clash yet somehow cohere. A floating, untethered vaporwave nightmare resembling Will Graham’s dreamlike beach apartment from Mann’s Manhunter. Its musical components are as loosely associated. Combining traditional Indonesian instruments with drones and synth washes recalls the futuristic prog of Tangerine Dream — the band which provided Mann’s The Keep (a curious namesake) with its soundtrack.

Oliver Knowles, the artist behind this The Keep, describes the genesis of Primer in ‘intrusive thoughts, anxieties, and a lingering sense of dread’. But like the Balinese gamelan from which it draws inspiration, Primer finds calm in chaos. The tone is eerily soothing — the perspectivised zen which can follow huge upheavals and tragedies. Primer presents an adverse world, but not a cruel one. Knowles never stoops to cynicism, or loses appreciation or gratitude for the world’s beauty.

Track titles are disarming, even humorous. ‘Fatberg’ and ‘Barry Manny Drone’ might not look out of place on a Pink Guy tracklist. But this doesn’t speak to a flippancy on Knowles’ part. Both tracks are utterly transcendent. Respectively frantic and still, they each scratch a different atrium of the heart.

Primer is stylish — that much is immediately clear. But what’s surprising is how much the EP reveals under closer scrutiny. On the surface, it’s a jumble of wildly different ideas and sounds. It’s a placeless room in which indoor streetlamps illuminate antique furniture. It should be fraying, bursting, falling apart at the seams. But keep digging , and you find the glue holding it all together.

Primer will be released on 6th December. Stream single ‘The Cub’ here.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe