by Big Flowers

How Moor Mother is redefining experimentation in sound

Moor Mother has spent a career discovering, foraging for a lesser-heard fruit, delivering walls of sonic battery like Analog Fluids of Sonic Black Holes. Here, there is space and time as a container of concept, still experimental but traditionally refined, exposing not only the lifetime’s worth of heritage built so far, but the tethers of community that tie Moor Mother to what brought her here.

For every action, there is an equivalent echo for those willing to hear it. With action erratic, contemporary, deconstructive and geometric, Moor Mother bounces and refracts through the canyons of a collective past. As an amalgam of everything bearing color, Black Encyclopedia of the Air serves as the reverberation of Moor Mother’s travels through quantum understanding. Sonic proof of an awakening purging itself through your music delivery vehicle of choice, this album possesses you intentionally and guides you through someone else’s wisdoms. From a discography that champions some of the farthest reaches of convention, BEotA mediates the extrema that Moor Mother has forayed into prior. Moderate in internal relativity, it still shrieks of an abstraction in a vacuum. Shekere embraces the ideas of modern RnB but diverges from a lush soundscape and tears a nostalgia shaped hole from your cognizance through emaciated string loops and bubbling keys. Iso Fonk ambles, hyper-aware and in an unrecognizable pattern, from one side of purgatory to the next. Tarot peels back a capital crush, dissolving a greyscale crust to reveal tribal purity, matriarchal maceration of life’s events through the music.

There is so much restraint practiced within the context of Moor Mother’s work on this album, and that to me is a testament to why it is so important in the modern day. Moor Mother has spent a career discovering, foraging for a lesser-heard fruit, delivering walls of sonic battery like Analog Fluids of Sonic Black Holes. Here, there is space and time as a container of concept, still experimental but traditionally refined, exposing not only the lifetime’s worth of heritage built so far, but the tethers of community that tie Moor Mother to what brought her here. From all of the journeys into the ends of sonic structure, BEotA returns to a center, calmly, but certainly illustrating a mural of afro-futurism. Moor Mother is a grandmaster’s wisdom precipitated into a young, vibrant and visceral vessel, megaphoning the liberation of black excellence in the crossing of temporal belts. Every moment is palpable through her work, and this is the best example I’ve heard of a concise execution of her ever-expansive plot. Nothing feels dilapidated, not a second seems out of place, and throughout its infinity, love and passion are found paramount. Even at its most gripping and corrosive climaxes, such as the anti-fade that is Clock Fight, it’s understood that the acoustics are tearing into you because they need to. What BEotA represents is importance, and the preservation of such. With wholesome motive and operative agenda, Moor Mother demands a moment of awakening, an uprighting of intention, and a fortressing of faith in self and family. This album should not be taken lightly or infrequently, as there is a life to unpack within.

BUY Black Encyclopedia of The Air below:

https://moormother.bandcamp.com/album/black-encyclopedia-of-the-air