Police brutality, domestic violence, race riots and western imperialism – the raw material for Camae Ayewa’s noise-infested “DIY time travel” performances as Moor Mother could hardly be more bleak. But the Philadelphia poet, activist and self-taught musician possesses a free-form energy and a knack for piercing visual imagery that can bring her subject matter to vivid life – usually while it’s still bleeding. “A husband beats a body raw,” she raps with a snarl, her dreadlocks falling like a veil over her face, “police drag a dead body on the floor.”
On her reputation-making 2016 album Fetish Bones, Ayewa used spoken word, free jazz, raw noise and sampled voices – including those of women such as Natasha McKenna, who died after being Tasered in prison – to create a homebrew twist on the Afrofuturism of fellow Philly artist-philosopher Sun Ra. Tonight’s show, however, finds her sharing a stage with soprano saxophonist Steve Montenegro, also known as Mental Jewelry, her collaborator on last year’s dub and dancehall-influenced Crime Waves EP. While Ayewa coaxes mangled, strangled noises from her array of glowing boxes, Montenegro channels the wild, squawking energy of Albert Ayler in an unbroken improvisation.
As Ayewa points out, it’s a set that should work perfectly in London; the bass-heavy tracks from Crime Waves owe an obvious debt to the fogged-out dancehall of the Bug and the square wave pulse of classic grime. It’s a shame, then, that the Islington’s weedy sound system can’t provide the necessary ballast for Ayewa’s throat-shredding calls-to-arms. Her “end of the world speech” loses some of its apocalyptic fervour when the wall of noise underneath is barely loud enough to mask a conversation. For anyone attempting to conjure up the fear-inducing euphoria of “dread” – that mysterious, noirish quality perfected by the architects of 70s dub reggae – volume cannot be an afterthought.
Despite the meagre sound, Ayewa brings a trembling intensity to her performance, chewing each word with satisfaction even when she’s reading off her laptop screen, as she does for a moment to deliver a custom screed for her British audience, riffing on her time-travelling concept of black identity: “We were here before the Queen, we were here before English.” And, though the stunted volume is disappointing, it does at least allow each word to cut like a knife, even when Ayewa throws herself into the crowd for the final, lightning-brief point on her agenda, as she makes physical contact with the front row, one by one: “You can see my dead body at the protest!”
