Moor Mother
Moor Mother
Moor Mother or Moor Mother Goddess is an experimental music project by Camae Defstar, a musician and poet from the United States.
Her work has been labelled “hardcore poetry,” “power electronics,” “slaveship punk,” and “protest music.” Ayewa herself resists categorization, preferring to self-identify through terms such as “time traveller” and “truth teller.” A self-described Afrofuturist, she uses spacetime-bending sound and lyricism to reformulate concepts of memory, history, and the future in an afrocentric or afrodiasporic tradition.
Ayewa is one half of the Black Quantum Futurism collective, along with Rasheedah Phillips of the Afrofuturist Affair. She has performed in the punk band The Mighty Paradocs, and is also the co-founder of Rockers! Philly, an “event series and festival focused on marginalized artists”. In June 2016, Ayewa and Phillips opened the Community Futures Lab, an “afrofuturist community center” in North Philadelphia where they lead workshops and teach-ins, provide space for artistic practice, and fight gentrification in the area.
Her debut album Fetish Bones was named one of the top experimental albums of the year by Rolling Stone, and Pitchfork as well as one of the best albums of the year by The Wire. The album is available on her Bandcamp page, along with several EPs, experiments, and collaborations from earlier in her career.
