The American poet and musician Camae Ayewa returns with with a pointed, powerful release aimed at Britain’s murky, slavery-profiting colonial past, with a vivid, profound, visceral, declamatory narrative and soundscape that charts many injustices about wealth and compensation. Working with various guest vocalists and the London Contemporary Orchestra, who accompanied her on tour, featuring clever instrumentation throughout, the title refers in particular to the 1837 Slave Compensation Act which compensated 46,000 slave owners in the empire a total of £20m – the equivalent of £17bn today – for their so-called lost “property” due to the abolition of slavery in 1835. This is especially driven home by Ayewa’s commanding voice, gradually increasing controlled rage on the track All the Money, also featuring Alya Al-Sultani, in which she points and the funding behind famous London landmarks. But before that, the opening track, Guilty, featuring Lonnie Holley Raia Was, is edgily dream-like, with otherworldly soaring vocals, African thumb piano, and pulls us in with a nine-minute atmospheric, cinematic work of strings and echoey electronica, whispering and clattering, summoning up ghostly images of slave ships, whips, machinery and human abuses. There’s simply no hiding from the truth on this visceral release.
God Save The Queen, featuring justmadnice, is a dark mix of electronica, keyboards and jazz trumpet on this seething, sharply ironic track (“because who else is worth saving?”). Liverpool Wins, with Kyle Kidd, is a crunching fusion industrial sounds with soulful, gospel-style lamentations, and describes further influx of wealth and images benefiting that city from slave income. Death By Longitude, and especially South Sea (with the fabulous Sistazz of the Nitty Gritty), will leave you gripped and shaken with those heavy breaths, melancholy vocalisations, woodwind and rumbling effects, not to mention of course Moor Mother’s own voice (“when and where do the ancestors speak for themselves”) leading then the way to closing track Spem In Alium. Not always an easy listen of course, but dramatic, disturbing, evocative, poetic, and uncompromising – an extraordinary, important fusion of spoken word and sonic landscape. Out on ANTI Records.
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