This year has seen no shortage of motivational music exhorting people to dance, protest or reconnect after shared trauma. But few fillips have been as instantly convincing as Open the Gates, the track heralding Irreversible Entanglements’ album of the same name.
“It’s energy time!” declares the Philadelphia-based poet and activist Moor Mother – AKA Camae Ayewa – as Luke Stewart’s sprung bass line plays off against a skitter of percussion from drummer Tcheser Holmes. Ayewa issues a command: “Open the gates!” The chorusing of Aquiles Navarro’s trumpet and Keir Neuringer’s saxophone send the track into ecstatic orbit, alive with political fury and spiritual possibility.
Irreversible Entanglements formed in 2015, after a Musicians Against Police Brutality concert. Their aim was to unite the words of Moor Mother with an unorthodox, improvised take on free jazz as a “vehicle for Black liberation”. Although this ensemble boast conservatoire rigour, their revolutionary, Afrofuturist music is imbued with punk spirit, a love of ambient spaciousness and electronics.
Open the Gates – it’s a double album – was recorded in a day and builds on the outfit’s two previous bouts of boundary-vaulting sonic activism, their 2017 eponymous debut and 2020’s Who Sent You?. Key, too, is Moor Mother’s interest in quantum physics and its intersection with the trauma of the African diaspora, an affinity noted by Cern, which this year bestowed her organisation Black Quantum Futurism its Collide residency award.
Open the Gates is out now via International Anthem/Don Giovanni
