Weekly Music Roundup: Julia Wolfe, Moor Mother, and Shards

Week of Sept. 2: This week, music for an historic tragedy by Bang on a Can Co-Founder and Composer Julia Wolfe, a dystopian future from Moor Mother, and Black Belt Eagle Scout's queer indigenous prom. 

Julia Wolfe Turns A Dark Moment In NY History Into Brilliant Music

Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Julia Wolfe unveiled a stunning work early this year called Fire In My Mouth, based on the notorious Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of 1911, in which 146 people, mostly women who’d immigrated from Eastern Europe or Southern Italy, lost their lives. Using texts from witnesses, survivors, and labor activists, Wolfe wrote this piece for the NY Philharmonic and its new music director Jaap Van Zweden. (The orchestra is huge, and includes electric guitar, Polynesian slit drum, and over a hundred pairs of scissors.) She also included the women’s voices from The Crossing, a top-shelf choir from Philly, and the girls of the Young People’s Chorus Of New York, for a total of 146 female voices. The piece is in 4 movements, and takes up close to an hour. Some of it is glowing; some of it is gripping; one brief part, if you’re following along with the text, is almost unbearable. Wolfe is one of the co-founders of the Bang On A Can new music organization, and has become associated with a pulsing, dramatic kind of post-minimalism that has absorbed rock’s energy and classical music’s sense of tone-color. But she has also made telling use of folk material in many of her recent works. Here, in the second movement of Fire In My Mouth, she weaves in a Yiddish folk song and a Southern Italian tarantella to show the background of the women as they worked under brutal conditions in their NYC factory. 

Try Moor Mother’s Simmering Stew Of Punk, Hip Hop and Gospel

Philadelphia’s Camae Ayewa is a vocalist, musician and artist who records under the name Moor Mother. She’s preparing to release an album in November called Analog Fluids of Sonic Black Holes, and this week she offered a first look in the form of the track “After Images.” The soundscape that her voice inhabits is a throbbing, arresting kaleidoscope of samples, from old field recordings to what sound like sci-fi films. Moor Mother’s brand of Afro-Futurism, at least on this song, is a dystopian one – “after they come for me they gonna come for you” is a recurring warning in the lyrics. And while there is one verse that is clearly rapped, most of the song is in a kind of cyberpunk chanting that neatly sidesteps questions of category. Ayewa has already proven that she’s a versatile performer, recording with the venerable Art Ensemble Of Chicago and the up-and-coming 700 Bliss with DJ Haram. And when Analog Fluids of Sonic Black Holes comes out on November 8, it’ll be accompanied by a book of Ayewa’s poetry called Analog Fluids.

A Starry New Song From Neil Young & Crazy Horse

Neil Young and his band Crazy Horse will be releasing their first album in seven years when Colorado comes out on October 25. He’s just unveiled the album track “Milky Way,” an electric guitar-driven ballad that features Young singing in his highest falsetto, with occasional grounding vocals by the rest of the band. There’s a typically stinging guitar solo, and lots of images of stars, the night sky and the unreliability of memory. Apparently the album was recorded mostly live in the studio (yes, in Colorado), and when it’s released it’ll be available in high-res digital audio or as a 3-sided double LP (the fourth side will be etched artwork). In the meantime, though, you can putter around in Young’s virtual studio; moving your mouse around on the webpage where “Milky Way” appears will bring you to archival material, a timeline, lyrics, and more. 

Black Belt Eagle Scout Releases At The Party With My Brown Friends

Black Belt Eagle Scout is the work of singer, guitarist, and songwriter Katherine Paul. If you haven’t come across her music, either here in these roundups or elsewhere, she is a Native American (Swinomish) artist who says that indigenous people “are often excluded from mainstream rock music and media.” Paul is claiming a space in rock for herself and her community, and has developed a Pixies-like play of soft and loud in her songs. Many of her tunes begin quietly before exploding into sheets of electric guitar and thundering drums; but her new album, called At The Party With My Brown Friends, is a lot more restrained. Take the song “Run It To Ya,” for example. The song, and its video of what Paul calls “a queer indigenous prom,” begins as a gentle rock ballad, although throughout the song you can hear several layers of guitar jangling and trembling around the edges of the mix. Finally, like a rider who at last lets the horses have their heads, she brings the drums in and lets the guitars take us home. 

Black Belt Eagle Scout plays at Brooklyn Steel on December 5.

London’s Shards Stand Tall

Okay, yes, that headline is a pun on the London skyscraper known as The Shard. Shards is a London-based vocal group, though maybe not quite a choir in the conventional sense. The group was put together by producer (and singer) Kieran Brunt, and he seemed to be less concerned with who was going to give him a smooth, classical choral sound, and more with who would share a pint with him when the sessions were done. (Or as Brunt puts it, “The group is made up of some my closest friends and musical collaborators.”) They’ve sung with Nils Frahm, Jonsi of Sigur Ros, and numerous others; and on Friday they released their debut LP, called Find Sound. Using only 12 voices, synthesizers, and percussion, Shards offer a surprisingly wide palette. There are actual songs, with lyrics, but some of the most striking tracks are instrumental – i.e., where the voices are used as instruments. This piece, “Unrest,” is one of them.