My track in the style of Moor Mother

To start off, I loaded all of the vocal samples into Ableton and began writing a musical base to go below them. I had recently been experimenting with microtonality prior to this, and decided to apply some of my takeaways from those experiments into this track. I’m not incredibly well-versed in music theory or microtonal theory, but the use I’ve found for it is to treat my keyboard like its an instrument I’ve never played before and search intuitively for intervals I recognise. When I write in this style, I like to keep it relatively simple and then embellish little parts of dissonant microtonality into what I’ve written. I found doing this helps me to transmit feelings that I can’t with 12TET when using a midi controller, it helps me to stop things from feeling robotic and more like live instrumentation with the nuances. I then listened through all of the takes and rearranged them to taste, to convey some form of progression throughout the track. At one point I accidentally played them all at once and really felt impacted by the effect it had. All of the voices saying the same thing but slowly unwinding out of time from their unison like a real crowd, became something I wanted to implement. To me, it feels like a crowd or a protest which fits the political nature of Moor Mother’s music. After a while of mainly explorative creation, I’d began to form a vision for what I wanted to do based off of what the audio was making me feel. I wanted to try to represent the moments when a society decides to revolt against their leadership (e.g a revolution). The start of the track is supposed to represent the feeling in the air before people are tipped over the edge. The music being peaceful but not quite, is aiming to be representative of the feeling of coping and denial, as a way to avoid facing issues that we recognise as a society. Things aren’t right but there’s still a lot for people to lose, so there’s a reason to be scared of failure in revolt. The speech, that begins playing with this music, starts with one clear voice and a couple extra layers that have been manipulated and scattered with delay to induce a little bit of chaos that does go on to grow. As the clear voice speaks, more layers are introduced to the point of incoherence. I did this to represent the spread of ideas and how the internet has a lot of us overwhelmed by information (and if that information is even real or not). The incoherence continues for a little longer and I feel it represents the dissonance people feel when they have so many thoughts and opinions that they dont know how to take action on, because the issues are so much larger than themselves. As we get to the end of this section, I decided to manipulate the audio tracks to sync up again on certain key phrases. This was a choice to represent the solidarity that people need to recognise amongst themselves in order to revolt. It’s the realisation that you aren’t alone and that people have the same concerns as you. Following this, the track takes a turn as the speech begins to directly mention going against the Government. I wanted the feeling of the entire track to change as soon as this was said, to represent the fear of punishment and not being able to go back to how things were before. I took the music from the previous section and manipulated it to aid this feeling. I timestretched it and transposed it to create a much darker atmosphere, the random interval I transposed it to helped create a sense of sudden and unnatural change that has force behind it. Before going into this section, I decided to use some industrial sounding noises as I wanted the idea of man vs machine to be present in this work. I liked the idea of using the image of a machine being broken as a way of showing revolt.