Album Review: Moor Mother and Nicole Mitchell- Offering

I walked out on Moor Mother at the Big Ears Festival last year.  After enduring 20 sweaty minutes of what I perceived as self-indulgent industrial art-rock in an overcrowded room, I bolted for another option.  Her compelling work with the Art Ensemble of Chicago aside, I’ve remained skeptical of the artist also known as Camae Ayewa.  I have no reservations about Nicole Mitchell.  Her set with Tomeika Reid and Mike Reed at Big Ears was transcendent.  And like Ayewa, she performs in the current incarnation of the Art Ensemble of Chicago.  Consequently, I didn’t know what to expect of Offering, a recording of the pair’s ostensibly improvised 2019 collaboration at Le Guess Who festival in the Netherlands.  The spoken word of Ayewa simmers with quiet intensity.  While Mitchell also plays flute, the electronics manned by both women regularly veer into musique concrète freakouts.  Ayewa is affiliated with the Black Quantum Futurism collective.  The label encapsulates the aesthetic of an album designed to captivate daring listeners who admire the most challenging works of John Cage, Amiri Baraka, Alice Coltrane and Angel Bat Dawid.

(Original image by There Stands the Glass.)