Double Bill: Moor Mother & Razen

The day after Moor Mothers passage in Einstein on the Beach, she returns for a duo show. Camae Ayewa, known as Moor Mother, moves between poetry, sound, and research, and exposes how colonial histories continue to work in the present. Her latest album The Great Bailout starts from the British compensation for slavery: a state loan, paid off until 2015, which did not compensate the victims but slave owners. For this performance, she forms a duo with cellist Mathis Mayr, active in new and improvised music. His practice moves between microtonality, historical instruments, and non-Western traditions. Together they build a set in which voice and string meet without a fixed role distribution: text, tone, and noise that influence, shift, and put each other under tension in real time. That same evening, Razen is also on the floor. Their latest album Stained Glass Starling was recorded in the living room of David Poltrock. No clean studio sound, no written-out score. Recordings in one take, with minimal agreements beforehand. What you hear is attention in action. Central: Brecht Ameel, Kim Delcour and Dick van der Harst, supplemented by Berlinde Deman (serpent) and Paul Garriau (hurdy-gurdy). Between mysticism and alien folk-trance, Stained Glass Starling leads the Razen universe to its most concentrated form. Music is built up as a painter works: layer by layer, with attention to contrast, texture, and nuance. All voices exist side by side, in a relational balance, related to principles from the Indonesian traditional gamelan. A wide range of instruments, including erhu, tromba marina, Javanese kacapi, harmonium, and foot bass, open the field to new sound worlds.