My followers know how much I've appreciated Moor Mother's music since I first listened to her album "Jazz Codes" (Anti-, 2022). I felt a similar intention in her work as I had encountered in Daniel Marcellus Givens' music at the start of the new millennium, and I was excited to hear someone continuing that artistic lineage. I was fortunate to have the opportunity to see Camae Ayewa (Moor Mother) perform live in Milan, having eagerly anticipated the chance.
Accompanied by a drummer whose jazz background was evident despite the music's departure from classic jazz, Moor Mother introduced the audience to her latest album, "The Great Bailout" (Anti-, 2023), playing only three pieces from that record. The compositions were transformed by new arrangements rooted more in noise and industrial music than jazz. Yet, Moor Mother has reached a point in her career where she can reinterpret pieces like "All The Money" or "God Save The Queen" without seeming derivative, even when compared to artists like Merzbow or Throbbing Gristle.
The live performance, consisting of just 50 minutes of drums played with sticks, electronic devices, small instruments, and Moor Mother's own vocals, was enough to captivate the audience, who showed their appreciation with warm applause at the end. The show began with small electronic sounds and electrified drumsticks, building layer upon layer into an impressive wall of sound. Moor Mother's phrases, such as "how long did it take to pay off the trauma?", echoed with sharpness and precision through the various noise textures, reflecting her time spent with Roscoe Mitchell and the Art Ensemble of Chicago, as well as other free jazz collectives like Irreversible Entanglement.
If I had to nominate some of the best musical moments this year, I would include this Moor Mother concert, along with the new albums by Jason Kao Hwang, Fontaines D.C., and Kim Gordon. However, we still have time before looking back and tracing the lines of musical tendencies for the past year. For me, Moor Mother's live performance in Milan's Triennale was the equivalent of last year's intense and bold concert by Michael Gira's Swans. The difference is that Swans are an institution in the post-punk continuum and among the most important founders of no-wave, giving them the freedom to do as they please. In contrast, Moor Mother and her collaborators are only recognized for their artistic value after the performance, which adds an extra layer of courage to their work.
Every time I hear of read about an artist such as Annie Clark – but it was the same with Beck Hansen during the 1990s – defined as ‘indefinable’, ‘elusive’ or one that doesn’t take into great account well refined identities, I usually think that, even outside of the box of postmodernism, this position is a great deal. In effect, having a persona that doesn’t correspond to your real self, or having your real self hidden, is something good for an artist.
I still remember an old, odd interview with Tom Waits in which the journalist – you can find this interview in the book Tom Waits on Tom Waits: Interviews and Encounters, edited by Paul Maher, Jr. (Chicago Review Press, 2011) in the chapter dedicated to the album Foreign Affairs (Asylum, 1977) – was, in his own words, unable to separate the persona from the real person, and Waits had to pass all the interview telling “I am not a drunkard”, basically. Strange and alienating.
So, when as an example Beck gave to the world the album Sea Change (Geffen, 2002) in which he was releasing custom love songs for the first time – even if some of these songs, like Paper Tiger, were heavily quoting Serge Gainsboug’s Histoire de Melody Nelson, and so once again far from a true ‘confession’ of personal feelings, that was enough to make his creativity loose part of its glaze, as anyone can listen from Guero (Interscope, 2005) on.
Strange as it can seem, the curse of having your own butterfly wings pin-pierced, just to use an expression Fernanda Pivano utilized to describe what Bob Dylan tried to avoid in all of his career, is something true. After all, this is something each one of us has experienced at least once in the era of the social networks. If you give all yourself to the world indiscriminately, you feel emptied, sooner or later.
I don’t know if people is obsessed by who the ‘real’ Annie Clark is – at least as far as I’m reading through reviews in my own country - because they’re bored or because they cultivate the secret desire to see another myth burning or falling; anyway, at least listening to her last effort All Born Screaming, the risk is avoided with great majesty and artistry.
All Born Screaming is an album of sui generis ‘pop’ songs – Clark’s technique is more that of drying her sources of inspiration, in this case industrial music as she herself expressed to the world in an Instagram post where you can find all the musicians she took inspiration from, from Throbbing Gristle to Nine Inch Nails, giving life to an expression of her own.
Obviously, you can find such diverse influences or better said assonances with the Byrds and David Bowie (Hell is Near), NIN (Broken Man), Bjork (Big Time Nothing), but at a first listening you’ll find yourself tied into a personal expression, artistically speaking. Ah, not the mention the fact that Clark, collaborator of such diverse artists as David Byrne and Taylor Swift, this time features at least Dave Grohl on drums in the track titled Flea.
In the end, more than an album of industrial pop, All Born Screaming is a collection of songs whose common ground is the desire to experiment and see how far you can go from your own perspective not renouncing to the pleasure of landing in different territories. And for once, who cares about who the ‘real Annie Clark’, who the ‘real personality of the artist’ is … after all, who is able to define him or herself? And so, why do we have to give artists such a thankless task?
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