The opening credits to »Scene 1« on The Film – the collaborative album by SUMAC and Moor Mother – run in lyrical chants, making it clear within seconds that this is no ordinary listening experience. Visionary avant-garde poet, activist and musician Moor Mother (aka Camae Ayewa) delivers a dystopian testimony that cuts deep into SUMAC’s massive post-metal backdrop with eruptive vocals. It’s a poetic demolition, an apocalyptic sonic statement that feels more like a layered movie of thoughts than a classic album. Anyone who doesn’t feel at least slightly existentially shaken after listening to this record should urgently check their attention filters.
What Moor Mother and SUMAC (aka Aaron Turner, Brian Cook and Nick Yacyshyn) do here is not just a fusion of styles – it is the construction of a sonic world. A world of sulfur, metal, language, fragments and dark theory. The tracks seem like sceneries, criss-crossed by scrolled revolutions, downloadable identities, people lost in screens. There is no pathos here, but rather disruption, fragmented power, stylistic condensation. And yet there is still room – between free jazz, noise, spoken word and doom – for a vision that disturbs, shakes and above all sounds radical.
