Camae Ayewa’s Moor Mother moniker has allowed the Philadelphia noise artist/poet to be a bit of a time traveler. Her work—deeply indebted to science fiction and theories of Afrofuturism—constantly pilfers sounds from the deep past and the far-flung future to make the present moment just a little more unstable. In her latest track, “This Week”—a collaboration with Geng (of the collective PTP)—Ayewa takes her furthest trip yet.
Aywe’s epic sense of scope, and a refined sense of sound design, is on full display here. Produced by Geng, the selection of creeping, alien sounds and rumbling drones—their slight but violently abrupt shifts in tone and emotion—posses a kind of brutal elegance and focused control. Whereas her previous songs could feel more like caustic collage, “This Week” hangs together more fluidly. They guide belching, unsettling sci-fi synths seamlessly into delicate samples of breaking glass. The crawling noises that dominate the track resemble Pharmakon, but they also utilize a sneaky sense of groove that recalls Amnesia Scanner. Above all, Ayews’s voice is weaponized in a way it hasn’t been before, due to Geng’s manipulation of the vocal recording. It lays in wait in a hurricane of noise, appearing only in sparse flashes, to shock a listener out of the doldrums of their day with stern, abstract warnings. It’s the kind of music that takes you to some wholly unknowable place.
