Upcoming Events at Issue Project Room
Sat Sep 28, 8:00 PM - Sat Sep 28, 10:00 PM
22 Boerum Place, Brooklyn, NY 11201
Community: Downtown Brooklyn
Description
Saturday, September 28th, ISSUE is pleased to present Moor Mother, the viscerally charged output of Philadelphia-based musician, poet, visual artist, and activist Camae Ayewa.
Event Details
As Moor Mother, Ayewa’s work operates at the intersection of spoken word, rap, punk, and free jazz, examining consciousness, identity, blackness, and the global socio-political landscape through an Afrofuturist lens. The evening also features new work from Jerusalem In My Heart (JIMH), the main project of Lebanon-born, Montreal-based artist and producer Radwan Ghazi Moumneh. The ISSUE debut of both artists, the evening spans both projects’ enduring interest in exploring both ancestral and contemporary narratives through powerful sound.
Moor Mother simultaneously wields harsh, cathartic noise and freely improvised textures of cosmic jazz, equally channelling her punk background and the spirit of Sun Ra. Her acclaimed albums Fetish Bones (2016), and The Motionless Present (2017) masterfully reimagined electronic noise as protest songs. During her days in the Philadelphia underground, in the early aughts, Ayewa recorded hundreds of unpolished, self-released songs and played in the local venues where she worked as a show booker. She describes her material as a mixture of “low-fi, dark rap, chill step, blk girl blues, witch rap, coffee shop riot gurl songs, southern girl dittys and black ghost songs,” and has focused on both interrogating and becoming a vehicle for truth. Her work is a vital document of what it means to survive centuries of oppression.
Jerusalem In My Heart collects sounds and melodies, both archaic and futuristic, to create a transcending musical manifestation. JIMH performances are enthralling multimedia experiences, forging modern experimental Arabic music and electronic compositions with a punk rock impulsiveness. Musically, JIMH is guided by Moumneh’s melding of ‘traditional” melismatic singing (in Arabic) and buzuk playing, with modern deployments of modular synthesis, filter banks, power electronics, field recordings, etc. JIMH recordings intentionally pay homage to the blown-out distortions of historical Arabic cassette tape culture, processed through modern currents of electronic music. Moumneh’s lyrical themes are deeply expressive and rich in political and socio-cultural historical consciousness: “there is a heartfelt yearning and emotion that unifies” the work, writes The Wire. A
Moor Mother simultaneously wields harsh, cathartic noise and freely improvised textures of cosmic jazz, equally channelling her punk background and the spirit of Sun Ra. Her acclaimed albums Fetish Bones (2016), and The Motionless Present (2017) masterfully reimagined electronic noise as protest songs. During her days in the Philadelphia underground, in the early aughts, Ayewa recorded hundreds of unpolished, self-released songs and played in the local venues where she worked as a show booker. She describes her material as a mixture of “low-fi, dark rap, chill step, blk girl blues, witch rap, coffee shop riot gurl songs, southern girl dittys and black ghost songs,” and has focused on both interrogating and becoming a vehicle for truth. Her work is a vital document of what it means to survive centuries of oppression.
Jerusalem In My Heart collects sounds and melodies, both archaic and futuristic, to create a transcending musical manifestation. JIMH performances are enthralling multimedia experiences, forging modern experimental Arabic music and electronic compositions with a punk rock impulsiveness. Musically, JIMH is guided by Moumneh’s melding of ‘traditional” melismatic singing (in Arabic) and buzuk playing, with modern deployments of modular synthesis, filter banks, power electronics, field recordings, etc. JIMH recordings intentionally pay homage to the blown-out distortions of historical Arabic cassette tape culture, processed through modern currents of electronic music. Moumneh’s lyrical themes are deeply expressive and rich in political and socio-cultural historical consciousness: “there is a heartfelt yearning and emotion that unifies” the work, writes The Wire. A
