Moor Mother
Moor Mother, 'Spring Again'
Camae Ayewa aka Moor Mother declares emergency. Wolf Weston sings: ‘Oh, the mountains say sweet things to me. Oh, I love to hear the trees hold the air we breathe’. Moor Mother cuts in: ‘it’s not reality’ and narrates harsher truths in a fierce rap, poetry and free jazz protest. Spring Again is performed in a confined studio space crammed with trombone, saxophone, drumkit, upright bass, violin and vocal booth. In close quarters Moor Mother gracefully conducts musicians, which include members of the Philadelphia free jazz ensemble, Irreversible Entanglements. A cut to monochrome film intensifies the airless claustrophobia. Spring Again is an injustice testimony: of climate injustice; of life-threatening pollution which affects people unequally; of coal worker’s black lung; of corporations taking land and drilling the Earth, of surveillance culture. ‘We can’t breathe’. Voices not heard; people shot down. No answers. This is music that teaches reality. Music as a distress signal. Moor Mother sends up a flare that extinction is coming and asks, ‘what timeline are you on?’
Moor Mother:
Nature is music. Nature is life. Nature is existential to my practice and mental health. From Environmental racism to biological warfare it is our responsibility to speak up about these atrocities. The people deserve to have access to nature and clean water not corporations. Corporations especially oil and gas companies should not own land that never was for sale. We need new laws that care about the health of the environment not the death of it.
Moor Mother
About Moor Mother
Philadelphia based Camae Ayewa (Moor Mother) is an international touring musician, poet, visual artist and workshop facilitator. She is a vocalist in three collaborative performance groups: Irreversible Entanglements, MoorJewelry and 700bliss. She has released multiple albums every year since Fetish Bones in 2016. In 2020, she launched a series of releases with Swedish musician Olof Melander, titled Anthologia, designed to raise funds for disability justice. Most recently, Ayewa released Black Encyclopedia Of The Air on the ANTI- label.
As a soundscape and visual artist, Camae’s work has been featured at festivals, galleries and museums including: Baltic Biennale, Pearlman Gallery, Metropolitan Museum of Art Chicago, ICA Philadelphia, Hirshorn Gallery and The Kitchen NYC. Her collective, Black Quantum Futurism, has been featured in exhibitions at the Schomburg Center, Rebuild Foundation, Temple Contemporary at Tyler School of Art, and the Serpentine Gallery.
