Irreversible Entanglements - Open the Gates
The Quietus
The poet, singer, orator, and activist Camae Ayewa – better known as Moor Mother – has been remarkably prolific in the last few years. She’s got range, too, careening from gnarled noise-rock in Moor Jewelry (her collaboration with Mental Jewelry) to something more akin to underground hip hop on recent collaborations with Billy Woods, Pink Siifu, and others. Rather than feeling like the work of a dilettante, Ayewa’s confident voice and vision serves to make it all feel like part of the larger Moor Mother project.
One would imagine, based on her politics, that Ayewa’s approach to collaboration is reasonably egalitarian, but the strength of her personality can still paint much of this work as Moor Mother + [Insert Collaborator Here]. Irreversible Entanglements, the “fire music” ensemble she co-founded with bassist Luke Stewart and saxophonist Keir Neuringer in 2015, and which now also includes trumpeter Aquiles Navarro and drummer Tcheser Holmes, is different. The overall feeling is decidedly more communal, the musical co-nourishment more palpable.
The group’s first two LPs were adventurous, but still firmly in the framework of their forebears: the Last Poets, the New York Art Quartet, Archie Shepp, etc. Drinking from the same ancestral well that informed earlier radical Black music is integral to Irreversible Entanglements’ approach: after all, they are passionate and angry for many of the same reasons as the aforementioned, because far too many of the circumstances remain the same. The fight isn’t over.
Open The Gates stays on the same spiritual trajectory, but it’s also an exciting dilation of their sonic universe. At times, there is more of the playfulness and street corner danceability of prime Art Ensemble of Chicago; elsewhere, washes of synth and dubby delay invade the stage, recalling nothing so much as Dennis Bovell or Adrian Sherwood’s claustrophobic productions.
While more catchy at times, as on the brief title track, Open the Gates is also even more temerarious than their earlier albums. A brief mid-section of ‘Keys to Creation’ collapses somewhere between Muhal Richard Abrams’ Spihumonesty and Mercurial Rites-era Hair Police, before thumping into a double-time lope with Moor Mother skating atop with strident declamations on “blues and memory” and “Ella flying home at the Savoy”.
The extended workout ‘Water Meditation’ gets into even noisier territory, overflowing with arrhythmic synth blurt and leaving Holmes at his kit holding the piece together. When the horns come back in, they’re in full fight mode, circling around the edges of the beat like the perimeter of a wrestling ring.
Moor Mother’s voice is an essential anchor on Open the Gates, but the album is more exciting taken as a group work than just the next in a long line of collaborative efforts. If recent history is any indication, Ayewa won’t be running out of things to say and exciting ways to say them any time soon. Still, for whatever reason, Open the Gates feels a step closer to acting on those words. It’s righteous music, hopefully as a prelude to righteous action.
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Wed Nov 10 14:13:50 GMT 2021Avant Music News
Wed Nov 24 14:33:02 GMT 2021
The Free Jazz Collective 90
By Martin Schray
Camae Ayewa a.k.a Moor Mother is pissed. Still. But in a different way than on Irreversible Entanglements’ previous albums. “Open the gates, it's energy time“, she snaps at the beginning of the title track of the new album. The poet, rapper and irritation artist (as a German critic called her) rages on for more than 70 minutes in word sequences of biblical power, rich in metaphor, sometimes full of anger, sometimes full of tenderness. Ayewa and her band - once again the wonderful Aquiles Navarro (trumpet), Tcheser Holmes (drums), Keir Neuringer (saxophone) and Luke Stewart (bass) - make greater use of electronic sound splinters, weaving them into a free-jazz tapestry of sound. Open the Gates was recorded in one day and is reminiscent of the greats like Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry (just listen to the wonderful brass section in “Storm Came Twice“), while “Keys to Creation“ gives an idea of how an electric Miles might sound in these stormy times. But more than anything else, the music of Sun Ra shines through on this album. Irreversible Entanglements create a kaleidoscope of Black Culture, whose threads reach into Afrofuturism, tradition and avant-garde - just like the Arkestra of the great alien from the planet Saturn. This may also remind us that jazz was once the soundtrack of the Civil Rights Movement, that sound can also be interference.
Open the Gates starts with a dance floor banger that uses the bass line of “Theme de Yoyo“ by the Art Ensemble of Chicago. But if you think Irreversible Entanglements have compromised and become more conciliatory, you’re wrong. The band shimmies to “Lágrimas Del Mar“, which swings briskly even as the tears flow: We are, after all, "so close to the good news." Above all, however, is the desire to explore the extremes. The central piece is the 20-minute “Water Meditation“, which talks about healing. Ayewa cools the souls: "We are sounding for peace." But the places she repeatedly invokes also identify hot spots of shameful racist violence. Musically, an acoustic bass stumbles over a polluted desert of sound, synthesizers remind us of gun salvos. They recorded the evil monsters from their bad dreams right along with it. How do they sound? Noise splinters, saxophone drones, muffled drums.
The album finally closes with “The Port Remembers“, in which the hope for healing is ultimately wiped away again. “A dream / I remember a nightmare“, Ayewa begins. “Lynch angels from 1590 / … The port remembers the slow walk into the void /Washing away the blood / … Dollar cotton / Forgive us of our debts / Our sins, our service / What always, would everywhere / What by all, is held to be true / He′s alive, dead alive in a grave“. The piece is one long lament about the original sin of slavery, the thorn in the flesh of the USA. The bass wanders, saxophone and trumpet drift apart, oblique, atonal. Nothing is alright, no cure in sight, the fighters are just disillusioned.
In October, Wynton Marsalis turned 60. At the concerts celebrating his anniversary, he has played, among other pieces, Sonny Rollins’s “Freedom Suite“: technically brilliant, flawless, clean. But today’s reality is ugly and dirty. Irreversible Entanglements reflect it in their music.
Watch the video for the title track:
Pitchfork 78
Read Megan Iacobini de Fazio’s review of the album.
Thu Nov 18 05:00:00 GMT 2021