Sumac & Moor Mother : The Film
In 2022 at the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, Camae Ayewa, aka Moor Mother, gave a 90-minute performance as part of a series called “Test Pattern,” presented as a single, continuous, multi-dimensional multimedia piece with no separation of songs or setlist to speak of. Collaborating with producer Ohbliv, cellist Elijah Hall, performance artist Vitche-Boul Ra and vocalist justmadnice, Moor Mother transformed stream-of-consciousness poetry into a three-dimensional experience both hypnotic and visceral. Bits and pieces of verses or motifs from albums like the then-recent Black Encyclopedia of the Air would emerge from the ether within the ever-changing, ever-evolving stream of sight and sound, like a jazz ensemble working familiar riffs into an extended improvisation. But this wasn’t a set of songs; that wasn’t the point—only the broader, consistently captivating whole.
The same can be said of Moor Mother’s debut full-length collaboration with Sumac. An hour-long record intended to be experienced as a continuous, unbroken piece rather than as disparate parts, The Film is much like its title suggests, an expansive cinematic vision. Though Moor Mother’s no stranger to explosively intense collaborators—including Godflesh’s Justin Broadrick and industrial-dub architect The Bug (to say nothing of her own visceral The Great Bailout from last year)—in Sumac she’s found a trio of kindred spirits, their combined experience in both improvisational works and open-ended collaborations making for a mutually beneficial and unpredictable excursion through furious sonic heights and social commentary through first-person narrative.
Where a comparable past work like 2020’s Circuit City was written specifically as a staged work with a central thematic thread, The Film is, fittingly, more widescreen. As Aaron Turner, Brian Cook and Nick Yacyshyn provide a volcanic score rife with drones, low simmering roar, piercing noise and violent eruptions, Moor Mother unravels what feels like a tense, abstract horror art-film script of trying to survive through a litany of destructive systems: war and capitalism, colonialism and propaganda, hate, power and fear. In the tense opening of “Scene 1,” she declares, “All they do is kill, they don’t want us to breathe,” only to respond in defiance: “I want my breath back.”
Yet to highlight any particular track here would seem to belie its purpose—The Film is not an anthology but an epic, one whose individual parts only grow more powerful as the whole comes into focus. If anything it’s in the more granular moments rather than discrete tracks that its gravity becomes most palpable, such as when Moor Mother laments, “We don’t remember what it ever means to be free” in the slow, post-rock march of “Scene 3,” the overwhelming and suspenseful cry of “I took off running!” in “The Run,” or in the titanic closer, “Scene 5: Breathing Fire,” the matter-of-fact urgency of a nation, a world, a people in crisis: “We are fighting for… our… lives!” The Film isn’t an academic exercise; it’s not the finer details of policy or players that resonate so much as the feeling of fear, despair, endurance and survival.
Label: Thrill Jockey
Year: 2025
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