[The Soup Nazi]

Originally Posted by Severian

Moor Mother at #2 is also surprising, but maybe this was the site I was talking about.

From The Wire's Moor Mother cover story (issue 425, July 2019):

A black hole is 'black' because its gravitational pull is so intense that nothing can escape it – not even light. The sonic equivalent of a black hole, I learn during my conversation with Camae Ayewa, is a fluid moving so fast it traps sound.

She describes the feeling of screaming in a sonic black hole: "The water's flowing faster than the speed of sound, so nothing's coming out."

For Ayewa, this nightmare image is an apt metaphor for the feeling of railing against an unjust system, with its police violence and mass incarceration and political corruption, that's so powerful it drowns out everything you throw at it. "We're here protesting and sharing stories, but when everything else is so loud, how do you penetrate through?"

This question is central to Analog Fluids Of Sonic Black Holes, a solo album under her Moor Mother name that she tells me she's just finished working on, due out later this year on the Don Giovanni label. It was also the title of her multimedia art exhibition in 2018 at The Kitchen in New York, where she was selected by Laurie Anderson as the recipient of the gallery's inaugural Emerging Artist Award. As a visual artist, Ayewa works in video, sculpture and collage, combining elements from disparate sources in order to draw connections across space and time to share the stories she speaks of. [...]