In celebration of the release of her album Black Encyclopedia of the Air (ANTI- Records), Moor Mother performs mesmerizing tracks on the Garden Terrace at sunset. Described as a “sonic mirage of prophetic soul,” they are songs about “memory and imprinting and the future, all of them wafting through untouched space like the ghostly cinders of a world on fire, unbound and uncharted, vast and stretching across the universe.” The album overall is described as though “a multitude of instruments and voices flocked to the ether to create something strange and unknown, a time-traveler’s guide to the modern world.” Ayewa will also debut a new poem titled “Skid Row Future.”

Members of the liberation-oriented, free-jazz collective Irreversible Entanglements, of which Ayewa is a member and vocalist, improvise and punctuate soundscapes in reaction to the site and other performers.

Moor Mother-collaborator Yatta Zoker performs an opening set. A multimedia artist and musician, they use incantations born of loop pedal drones, channeled screams, and improvised poetry to explore connections between psychosis, prayer, and presence.

Looping throughout the evening are short films by the award-winning interdisciplinary art practice Black Quantum Futurism, of which Ayewa is one-half, along with artist, author, community activist, and lawyer Rasheedah Phillips.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Camae Ayewa, aka Moor Mother, is an international touring musician, poet, visual artist, and workshop facilitator, and has performed at numerous festivals, colleges, galleries, and museums, sharing the stage with King Britt, Roscoe Mitchell, Claudia Rankine, bell hooks, and more. Moor Mother’s debut album, Fetish Bones, was named third best album of the year by The Wire and best album by Jazz Right Now. Ayewa is a 2016 Leeway Transformation awardee, a Blade of Grass 2016 Fellow as part of Black Quantum Futurism, a 2017 Pew Fellow, The Kitchen’s Inaugural Emerging Artist Awardee in 2017, and the Rad Girls 2016 Philly artist of the year. She has been an artist-in-residence at West Philadelphia Neighborhood Time Exchange and WORM! Rotterdam.

Irreversible Entanglements are a free-jazz collective formed in early 2015 by saxophonist Keir Neuringer, poet Camae Ayewa (a.k.a. Moor Mother), and bassist Luke Stewart, who came together to perform at a Musicians Against Police Brutality (MAPB) event organized after the slaying of Akai Gurley by the NYPD. Months later the group added trumpeter Aquiles Navarro and drummer Tcheser Holmes (a duo who also performed at the MAPB event) for a single day of recording at Seizure’s Palace in Brooklyn. The full quintet’s first time playing together was recorded for their debut self-titled album which arrived to wide critical acclaim, hailed by many as one of the Best Albums of 2017 including NPR, The Wire, and Stereogum. Their second album, Who Sent You?, was released in 2020, and a new record, Open the Gates, will be released this November.

Yatta Zoker is an artist, performer, and musician. Most recently, they released DIAL UP, a collaborative album with Moor Mother. In 2019, their album WAHALA served as the foundation for An Episode: Ricky’s Room, written and performed by Zoker and commissioned by The Shed in New York City. Over the years, Zoker has shared the stage with musicians like Cardi B and The Sun Ra Akestra, creating multimedia performances that tour astrally, nationally, and globally. Their work has been featured in Nylon, The Creative Independent, Pitchfork, Tiny Mixtapes, The Wire, and more.

Black Quantum Futurism is a multidisciplinary collaboration between Camae Ayewa and Rasheedah Phillips exploring the intersections of futurism, creative media, DIY-aesthetics, and activism in marginalized communities through an alternative temporal lens. BQF Collective has created a number of community-based events, experimental music projects, performances, exhibitions, zines, and anthologies of experimental essays on space-time consciousness. BQF Collective is a 2016 A Blade of Grass Fellow, a 2015 artist-in-residence at West Philadelphia Neighborhood Time Exchange, and had their experimental short, Black Bodies as Conductors of Gravity, premiere at the 2015 Afrofuturism Now! Festival in Rotterdam. A recent winner of the Collide Residency Award, BFQ will be in residence at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, followed by the Hangar Centre for Art Research and Production in Barcelona, in connection with the city’s scientific laboratories.How to Get Here