Moor Mother (US)

Hard-hitting 21st-century protest music awaits from award-winning activist, poet and musician Moor Mother as she returns to ALICE with her noise-montages and dystopian rap. With her she has her legendary work “Fetish Bones” (2016), which she celebrates the 10th anniversary of.

Despite his utterly uncompromising and dystopian music, Afrofuturist activist, poet and musician Moor Mother (Camae Ayewa) made it onto virtually every major music magazine's annual list in 2016 — from Pitchfork and Vice to Spin and The Wire. The latter placed the album “Fetish Bones” in the top 5 alongside David Bowie and Autechre, and Jazz Right Now named the album the best of the year. Today, ten years later, the album remains as groundbreaking and scorchingly topical.

No one sounds like Moor Mother. With anarchic flair, she samples everything from Fugazi to Alice Coltrane, which are pulled out and broken up, and transformed into dense, compact soundscapes. A flux of sounds that spans moments of harsh noise to rapid sonic infernos as she raps relentlessly over. The lyrics are about being a racially demented, underclass woman in the United States, about violence, sexism and racism. As the music magazine Spin has written about her music, it's “protest music that can actually resonate in the 21st century.”

Moor Mother is a remarkable, honored artist and a radical voice who, in addition to her solo project, has set the agenda with Irreversible Entanglements and 700 Bliss, and a host of collaborations across the alternative music scene. We have previously enjoyed Moor Mother at ALICE, where she has played intimate and hard-hitting gigs for a full hall. We are honored to be able to introduce her again when she returns in November.

Said about “Fetish Bones”

Moor Mother might be the most radical — even the most useful — Afrofuturist artist to emerge for years. Fetish Bones works not just as an atlas and an archive but as a mausoleum, housing the bones of those who have fallen along a bloody trail stretching all the way back to 1886” — The Wire

“Fetish Bones is her masterclass on creating a sensory experience that interrogates your complicity, pushing you through a door that sends you hurtling through time” — PITCHFORK