Moor Mother on Sampling, Afrofuturism and Collaboration

Moor Mother is a Philadelphia-based artist, musician and activist who utilizes her multi-genre practice to speak to consciousness, identity, blackness and the sociopolitical global landscape. She started to record and release music in 2012 as a solo project under the porous, playful rubric of self-defined sounds like “project-housing bop,” “slaveship punk” and “blk girl blues,” and her output is a patchwork quilt of spoken word, poetry and fractured lyricism alongside guttural electronics, dissonant textures and fragments of instrumentation. Her discography is vast and expanding, with albums like 2016’s Fetish Bones and 2017’s The Motionless Present critically acclaimed exercises in power electronics and intense vocalizations.

Moor Mother discussed her upbringing in Maryland, Black Quantum Futurism, being addicted to collaboration and the writing process in her lecture at RBMA Berlin 2018. #RBMA20 #afrofuturism #sampling

TOPICS:
6:15 – Growing up in Aberdeen, Maryland
14:46 – Stumbling into Afrofuturism
20:45 – Moving to Philadelphia and finding new scenes
33:26 – Writing and sampling approaches
39:55 – The Black Quantum Futurism collective and project
51:44 – The need for collaboration

MUSIC:
30:34 – Moor Mother – “Programma”
35:47 – Moor Mother – “Creation Myth” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fm93dYZIVIo
47:06 – Moor Mother – “The Autonomy of Shori”
1:00:20 – Irreversible Entanglements – “Fireworks” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4joenjtD6w