Photo by Ebru Yildez

To listen to Moor Mother is to witness the deconstruction of the history of humankind. More specifically, it is a studied deconstruction of the history of the Black experience on a universal scale since the start of time. While Camae Ayewa has always positioned the radical nature of this through a poetry in sound wrought in a balance between mesmerizing displays of noise, cosmic jazz, hip-hop beats, and the truth, “GUILTY” — the lead single from her forthcoming studio album, The Great Bailout — prefaces the former with the latter in arguably her most jagged examination on the subject. Joined here by kindred creative political improvisionist Lonnie Holley as well as the experimental spells of harpist Mary Lattimore and art-pop pianist and vocalist Raia Was, Ayewa’s introduction into her examination of British Colonialism and the resulting diaspora of African communities is cataclysmic in questioning today through the lens of what has been survived since centuries ago. “Did you pay off the trauma? / The horror of the whip of the sugar cane?,” she asks. Her creative collaborators’ layering presences are like that of ghost ships, with Ayewa bringing a history that still haunts us right into the foreground of modern time.

Directed by: Scott Kiernan

Moor Mother’s The Great Bailout will be released March 8th on ANTI- Records.