
Despite its uncompromising and dystopian sound, the Afrofuturist activist, poet and musician Moor Mother (Camae Ayewa) landed on virtually every major music magazine’s year-end lists in 2016 – from Pitchfork and Vice to Spin and The Wire. The latter placed Fetish Bones in its top five alongside David Bowie and Autechre, while Jazz Right Now named it album of the year. Ten years on, the album remains just as brilliant and fiercely relevant.
No one sounds quite like Moor Mother. With an anarchic sensibility, she samples everything from Fugazi to Alice Coltrane, pulling sounds apart and reshaping them into dense, compact noise landscapes. A torrent of sound stretching from moments of harsh noise to frantic sonic infernos, over which she raps with relentless intensity. Her lyrics explore what it means to be a racialised, working-class woman in the US, confronting violence, sexism and racism. As Spin put it, her music is “protest music that can actually resonate in the 21st century.”
Moor Mother is a remarkable and widely acclaimed artist and a radical voice who, beyond her solo work, has helped shape the sound and agenda of projects such as Irreversible Entanglements and 700 Bliss, alongside a wealth of collaborations across the alternative music scene. We have previously had the pleasure of welcoming Moor Mother to ALICE, where she has delivered intimate and hard-hitting performances to a packed room. We are honoured to welcome her back this 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
