Moor Mother: Origin stories

Moor Mother’s music doesn’t ever not sound like Moor Mother. Yet any attempt to identify what that sound is is condemned to being bogged down by unpredictable tangents, sub-tangents and footnotes. This unknowable quality is only enhanced by the breakneck pace of the collaborative projects, solo albums, tours and bands that Ayewa has generated since her first release in 2016.

From a sidewalk somewhere in Philadelphia, while intermittently drowned out by the beeping of reversing trucks and the city-level pitch of passerby conversations, Ayewa muses on how her immediate surroundings tend to shape her artistic process. By birth she is a native of the state of Maryland, where she was raised in “a rural area that was all Black and isolated”. Through her work over the last decade as a musician, producer, performer, poet and visual artist she has become inextricably linked with Philadelphia, her adopted home. Her presence there adds to the myth of a city that has so successfully overlapped iterations of Black musical traditions, poetry, spoken word and musicianship that it nurtured a pedigree of Black female artists like Bahamadia, Jill Scott and Tierra Whack.

“We romanticise the inner city,” says Ayewa, “because we romanticise the music. It’s great, but it’s hard here. Philadelphia is the biggest, poorest city in America, so it’s got that real DIY, hard-worker type of energy. There is a lot of suffering here.” In inexhaustible Moor Mother fashion, though, even the least desirable of circumstances can be transformed into an opportunity for more self-inquiry. Upon returning to Philadelphia in early 2020 after a set of energising solo shows in Venice, Italy, Ayewa was about to head out on tour with her free-jazz ensemble Irreversible Entanglements when the shelter-in-place ordinance was issued in March. “I’d been travelling all over the world for the past five years,” she recalls of this period. “I didn’t know what was going on in my home space. It was good for me to check in with myself. I also made eight records during the quarantine.”

One of these records is Black Encyclopedia of the Air, the first release in a triptych of albums. Black Encyclopedia and its follow-up album Jazz Codes will find Ayewa de- and re-constructing R&B sensibilities, while the third album of the set will skew more electronic.

This is an unexpected development for an artist who is seemingly so inclined towards the avant-garde. The Moor Mother project was, after all, forged in Philadelphia’s noise, alt-poetry and queer activist scenes, and Ayewa’s vocal persona seems to thrive on a lack of vanity (see: the monotonic bark she deploys as part of the post-punk/ hardcore duo Moor Jewelry, or the breathy exhortations as one half of 700 Bliss with DJ Haram, who strip back the glitz on their drop-it-low, ballroom-inflected dancefloor tracks). Yet, more often than not in R&B, the refined and polished vocal is the jewel in the genre’s crown. To reconcile these extremes, Black Encyclopedia required an element of shapeshifting: words are crooned, tranquilly rapped, spoken in a way that nestles deep in the ear, with Ayewa’s signature multi-layered vocals reduced to just one or two deep. It’s certainly a definitive departure from the unnerving industrial vertigo of her 2016 debut album Fetish Bones.

The beats of Black Encyclopedia were produced by Swedish artist Olof Melander. The pair have collaborated previously, but the head-nodding ease of Melander’s production forms the spine of this album; the sound is warm, spacious and low-slung, with its rounded edges buffed to smooth perfection. “I guess my main goal is to be more accessible,” offers Ayewa, by way of explanation, “but not forever. It’s just the message in this particular form – it’s not about being a whole different character to pull it off. I wanted to reach more ears.”

While the approach to Black Encyclopedia is pragmatic, it also obscures the album’s grander purpose – to act as a creative catalyst. When Melander sent her dozens of tracks to work with in March 2020, Ayewa’s focus was squarely on what would become the second album in this series: Jazz Codes. For an artist who is uniquely prolific – “I tend to work so fast that people are like, ‘We made this already?’” – Jazz Codes had become an unusual thorn in her side. Ayewa doesn’t indicate whether that album is complete or not, but she does reveal her frustration with it, describing a two-year period of stop-and-starts, doubt and revisions.

Within this arc, Black Encyclopedia is a crucial mapping document; an accompanying cipher to illustrate how Ayewa eventually made steps to crack Jazz Codes. Black Encyclopedia was also a much easier concept for Ayewa to execute; as per her usual pace, it was completed within the month of March 2020. It’s a snapshot, as well, of an artist occupying liminality on two fronts: quarantining in those uncertain early weeks of the pandemic, and capturing the moment an artist was up against a project they seemingly didn’t have the clarity to resolve.

“I made 13 songs for fun,” Ayewa says of the songs that constitute Black Encyclopedia. “It wasn’t intentional. It was just me using this energy that would soon run out. I would eventually become depressed, but I wasn’t sad yet.” In the months to follow, Black Encyclopedia served an additional crucial purpose: a healing balm for its creator, through the consecutive, cumulative griefs that marked the remainder of that year. “It saved me,” she says of the album. “I would go take walks and listen to it. It kept me balanced.”

Despite the sleeker delivery vehicle, Ayewa’s narrative flow on Black Encyclopedia is still very much her own. She flips from the searingly personal to the impressionistic; macro, micro and stream-of-subconscious are laced together with fire-spitting warnings and admonitions. Literal and metaphorical connections to Earth, history, memory and myth are made inexorable from Black histories, Black femme realities, with the Black mother forever a muse and guide. No more so than in the album’s opening track Temporal Control of Light Echos, which features the line: “How I had to fight through crowds of humiliation/ And how I had to cover up my own face/ And carry my mother, your mother, her mother/ the mother in my womb.” 

“I’m here for the mothers,” admits Ayewa. “That’s why I called myself Moor Mother. I don’t just mean the person who birthed a child. We’ve been raised by our aunts, uncles, grandmothers. We are, as a people, communal. But the stark reality of living here in Philadelphia is also: who is the most evicted person? Who is the most unhoused person? It’s the Black mother. We’ve got to understand that by holding up the most vulnerable, we are helping everyone else.”