No one would accuse experimental noise poet Moor Mother of “going soft”—except maybe Moor Mother herself. Ever since her 2016 debut Fetish Bones, the artist born Camae Ayewa has delivered fierce litanies on multigenerational trauma, specifically the scars left from centuries of racial strife and female suffering. Her voice has sounded at once like a serrated blade and the thing it has just cut; her discordant production has ensured that no listener escapes unscathed.
But on her forthcoming album Black Encyclopedia of the Air, Ayewa presents a less confrontational side. “At first I was calling it my ‘sell-out album’ as a joke,” she tells me on a recent call from her sweltering Philly studio. “But in reality, I wanted to make it more accessible, and to get to ears that don’t really know me or have been afraid of me.”
True to her mission, the production is smooth and slinky, often nodding to ’90s R&B. Rather than sounding off alone, Ayewa enlisted a string of underground rappers, including Pink Siifu and London’s Brother May, to round out her sprawling poems. Even her voice has shifted into a low, velvety register. “I felt the noisy kids would be mad,” she says of her lighter touch. When I assure her that the record is still quite weird, she laughs. “So I didn’t make a Disney album then?”
Black Encyclopedia of the Air functions as a musical Trojan horse, disguising painful narratives as a polished gift. Jazzy opener “Temporal Control of Light Echoes” is loose, even soothing, yet it culminates with a menacing image: “This place is a gathering of bones,” Ayewa chants. On “Race Function Limited,” over the pulse of piano keys, she almost whispers her harshest words: “Mama made me/Tall baby/Out the guts of slavery/Grits and gravy/Shackled babies.”
Outside of its sound, the record symbolizes an entirely new era for Moor Mother. Once reliant on self-releasing and DIY distribution, Ayewa recently signed with eclectic indie mainstay ANTI-, current label home to revered legends like Mavis Staples and Tom Waits. Ayewa sought out the label in part to reach more listeners, but also because of its deep investment in heritage artists. “They uplift elders, which is really what I’m about,” Ayewa tells me. “I worked with a lot of elders when I came onto the scene. That’s who embraced me.”
Here, Ayewa discusses contemporary protest songs, making music for mothers, and reshaping historical trauma into works of liberation.
Camae Ayewa: I wrote a new poetry book called Jazz Codes and I reached out to a producer friend of mine that had some really beautiful dusty jazz loops. My idea was to make the poetry more focused on the record, so I sent him an email and he ended up sending me hundreds of instrumentals. How I like to work with music is to have an album that I’m working on, and then something fun for myself. Encyclopedia is the fun moment for me. The other album was harder to get done.
This was just the mood of these two records. They’re really soft. And I was nervous about that because I like noise. I’m constantly going into different genres and fields to make the message more accessible. It’s really for young people and for mothers to be able to tap into what I’m doing. This record is like a gateway, a trickery: bringing people in with the smooth vibes. But if you know my music, I like to punch people in the heart and then kiss the heart. As musicians, we are conductors of human emotion, and the more tuned in you are, you can really pull this out of people. It’s about understanding the different ways that I have to go with such a radical message. My music is tied to a future and a history.
The title came after; with so many collaborators, it felt like this kind of encyclopedia. I’ve been talking about this idea of being a conductor like Quincy Jones, pulling all of these pieces together for this anthology. And it’s not like “the encyclopedia of physics terms” or something. It’s like the air; it’s this unknown, important force that we all need. But the only thing we talk about is Air Jordan. We’re not talking about air molecules or the trees. Those are the biggest rock stars I can imagine: trees and oxygen.
Because of the quarantine last year, I was on the internet a lot more, so I had a chance to celebrate people I wouldn’t meet. I had this Rolodex that I could tap into, and I think it worked out. I sent a song to Pink Siifu, and he came back with this amazing verse. I’d already dialed it in so much for him, he just had to pick up the phone. I didn’t speak to him about recording, but it sounds so effortless. And that’s what I wanted: for him to be like, “Let me step into this real quick, boom, boom, boom. Here you go.”
Before I even started working with music as a professional, I always considered myself a lightworker—someone here to help balance. I feel like the world is really unbalanced, whether it’s between positive or negative vibrations, or good and evil, or whatever ways you want to categorize these two polarities. With my collective Black Quantum Futurism, we speak about how to walk through events and how we’re not bound by time. We have the agency to go back through history on our own accord and tell these stories.
In my first album, Fetish Bones, when I time-traveled through the race riots, that’s through the Black Quantum Futurism lens. I was able to read and research something so horrific but see it through the lens so I have more agency, so it’s not something that I’m weighed down by. It’s traumatic events, but it’s not some prescribed trauma that I’m attaching to things. And that’s how history is. We don’t really tend to talk about things when they’re so horrific, but I’m trying to show people that there’s a different way of going through these events with this sense of freedom versus being weighed down by what’s been prescribed. And to show people that we can look at our history, and there are beautiful things.
The themes of Kwanzaa. One principle in Kwanzaa is faith, or cooperative economics. We call it “mutual aid” now, but these things have always been happening in communities through history.
I would love to get some recommendations from you, because I’m not seeing anything. People are making good music, but it’s political? No. Not that I’ve seen. It’s pretty safe. What are they saying beyond “fuck you” or “I’ll kill this guy,” or “fuck Donald Trump”? What does that really mean? What does that do? Maybe “fuck” is not radical enough. It’s too common. Little kids say “fuck.”
Yeah, it’s cool as a song, but is that like some grand political statement? We need to say more than “fuck you” or “I’m a drive to your house and kill you.” I’m sorry. That’s not enough for me. That’s a joke. Not to be so rude. YG is really cool. I think that song was really awesome, but if we’re talking about radical statements and protest music, just standing around saying “F this,” what is that accomplishing? I grew up in a time where pop music was pretty radical: Public Enemy, Rage Against the Machine, Saul Williams. People were saying some pretty explicit things 20 years ago. Is anybody saying anything more political than what Rage was saying 20 years ago?
I want more artists to get into the blues, free jazz, and gospel music. Those genres—not only is it Black American classical music, but it’s also a liberation technology. We have to redefine what music is to ourselves—what we can do with this music. Sun Ra tried to send us off on the path of what we can do with music, but we tend to focus more on Sun Ra’s outfits than what he was trying to do. And that’s because of how popular things have become and what’s marketable and what seems diverse enough for curators. But improvised music is where it’s at because it’s into the unknown. For some songs on this album, I was just making up the words as I did a freestyle.
“Shekere.” I’m having fun. I’ve been working this improvisational muscle for so long. It was actually Pitchfork Fest in Chicago that was kind of a breakthrough for me. It wasn’t a Moor Mother performance, but an Irreversible Entanglements performance. I usually read from my poetry book but I forgot to bring it, so I had to go deep within myself to create poetry on the spot. Since then, I don’t need my book at all, even when recording. I can just say whatever I want. I can get into the feeling. The conducting is the most important part because that sets me up the most. Then the words flow.
