MOOR MOTHER RELEASES CHILLING NEW ALBUM
‘THE GREAT BAILOUT’ TODAY
LISTEN HERE
Photo Credit: Ebru Yildiz
“A call to consciousness.” – DJ Mag
“A powerful depiction of British cruelty.” – Clash
“A grand, artistic and political statement in an age when such vision is too rarely attempted.” **** MOJO
“The feeling of a theatre piece, characters coming onstage for a single area, then vanishing… It remains unified because of Ayewa. Her cold rage, expressed in pitiless, relentless verse, is the pulsing heart of it all.” – The Wire
Moor Mother aka Camae Ayewa makes music about those left behind – the disenfranchised, the misunderstood and the forgotten. That ethos is more predominant than ever on her latest album, ‘The Great Bailout’, out today via ANTI- Records.
A frequent reader of history and research books, Ayewa was taken aback at the way the United Kingdom’s history of slavery has been made a footnote of their story. Most telling is the 1835 Slavery Abolition Act, which a 2015 article in The Guardian explains was a loan that became “the compensation of Britain’s 46,000 slave owners [and] was the largest bailout in British history until the bailout of the banks in 2009. Not only did the slaves receive nothing, under another clause of the act they were compelled to provide 45 hours of unpaid labour each week for their former masters, for a further four years after their supposed liberation. In effect, the enslaved paid part of the bill for their own manumission.”
“Displacement and its effects are not discussed enough,” Ayewa says. “The PTSD of displacement should be a focus, and as we have the opportunity to learn about things happening in the world, we also have the opportunity to learn about ourselves. We’ve been through so many different acts of systematic violence.”
An intense listen that is at times both stunning and haunting, listen to the album in full here: https://moormother.ffm.to/
‘The Great Bailout’ is Ayewa’s ninth studio album and third with ANTI- Records, with production contributions on various tracks from Lonnie Holley, Angel Bat Dawid and Sistazz of the Nitty Gritty, Ambrose Akinmusire, Vijay Ayer, Mary Lattimore, Aaron Dilloway and more. Called “the poet laureate of the apocalypse” by Pitchfork, Ayewa’s music contains multitudes of instruments, voices and cacophony that take on themes of Afrofuturism and collective memory with the forebearers of jazz, hip hop and beat poetry in mind.
This movement, or rather entanglement, between gentleness and horror, rage and grief, is the warp of the long poem that is the album. But this is just one way onto the tour to which you are invited by ‘The Great Bailout’. You can also just breathe and enter, to reckon with a horror story hiding in plain sight and be lifted by the poignant beauty that is black poetry and music making as freedom in the otherwise and ‘everywhens’ mediated through a journey into Britain.
Moor Mother will begin a run of European tour dates tomorrow; all upcoming dates are listed below.
TOUR DATES
3/9 – Zurich, Switzerland @ Currents Festival
3/11 – Bristol, UK @ Bristol Beacon
3/12 – London, UK @ Total Refreshment Centre
3/13 – London, UK @ Church of Sound
3/22 – Bergamo, Italy @ Bergamo Jazz Festival
3/24 – Bologna, Italy @ Social Center TPO
4/26 – Norman, OK @ Norman Music Festival 2024
5/6 – Paris, France @ Lafayette Anticipations
5/18 – New York, NY @ Park Avenue Armory
Order ‘The Great Bailout’
1. GUILTY FT LONNIE HOLLEY & RAIA WAS
2. ALL THE MONEY FT ALYA AL SULTANI
3. GOD SAVE THE QUEEN FT JUSTMADNICE
4. COMPENSATED EMANCIPATION FT KYLE KIDD
5. DEATH BY LONGITUDE
6. MY SOULS BEEN ANCHORED
7. LIVERPOOL WINS FT KYLE KIDD
8. SOUTH SEA FT SISTAZ OF THE NITTY GRITTY
9. SPEM IN ALIUM