Moor Mother - The Motionless Present (2017)

Philadelphia-based artist and activist Moor Mother leaves her indelible mark on CTM x VF’s Fear Anger Love series with a thornily tortuous dispatch from the frontline of American race politics.

Collecting 10 previously unheard poems and soundscapes including collaborations with Geng, Mental Jewelery and Black Quantum Futurism, the results are no doubt a formidable follow-up to Moor Mother’s mad acclaimed Fetish Bones [2016] LP, pursuing that record’s themes with an arguably more abstract, layered aesthetic connoting an urgent sense of confusion without any sort of clear resolution.

The Motionless Present opens the record with a knot of panic-inducing rhythmic noise and blues holler, before PTP Geng renders Moor Mother at her widest and most haunting in the strikingly weightless, beat-up sound design dimensions of This Week, and she then spirals off into splashing flashcore-meets-tribal chaos in Earthquake Hymn and the curdled, arrhythmic fizz of Day Rules.

Detached and processed field recordings open up 4 Oakland and get suppressed into the cold clam and declamations of privilege in A Way Out, with 700 Bliss joining in on the detached wormhole of 29th and a brace of collaborators help to frame, harness Moor Mother’s angry observations on “the disconnect between humanity and injustice”, with Mental Jewelry aiding on the cyber-swampy crush of Remember and a dread dub killer named Big Crime, while the side culminates in the decidedly discomfiting use of a notorious YouTube video of an unwarranted arrest, here smothered in viscous electronic noise.