High Impact

And The Film asserts its filmic elements. Song titles include “Camera,” “Scene 2: The Run,” “Scene 5: Breathing Fire.” Even “The Truth Is out There” invokes visual narrative through its reference to The X Files (1993-2002), the charmingly harebrained television series that made FBI agents sort of sympathetic (it helps to have Gillian Anderson frequently in the frame). The Film has no such illusions about Executive Branch powers. Early in “Scene 1,” the record’s first track, Camae Ayewa asserts, “I want my breath back.” The clause makes its own allusion, to the last words of Eric Garner, choked out and murdered by the NYC cops. A little later in the song, Ayewa snarls, “You didn’t demand more from a democracy of monsters / They told you to turn down that music or they’ll shoot you,” which sounds like a reference to Jordan Davis, a 17-year-old black kid murdered in a Florida parking lot for playing rap too loud; just before shooting Davis, Michael David Dunn, a 45-year-old white man, told his girlfriend, “I hate that thug music.”

The musicians respond to that miasma of hate by playing very, very loudly. “Scene 3” concentrates SUMAC’s capacity to coordinate doomy textures into a slow crawl. The band incrementally increases the atmosphere of dread as Ayewa moves her lyrics into images wrought with the force of her own rage and disgust (“America pissed and shit itself, no diaper / Obituaries and death don’t need no writer”). The accumulated intensity is visceral; you know a break is coming, and you want it even if you sort of fear its shattering, deafening blast.

Moor Mother and SUMAC are all adept improvisers, uncannily able to gather impulses and sounds that verge on chaos into aesthetic forms that feel saturated with meaning and intent. That’s an intrinsically human ability. The Film summons, with nearly apocalyptic dread, the contrasting sound of the machine on one of its most forceful tracks, “Camera”; a mechanical voice intones, “I am a smart fellow, as I have a very fine brain of 48 electrical relays.” Is that you, ChatGPT? Actually, it’s Elektro, the robot Westinghouse engineered for the New York World’s Fair in 1939. A year to conjure with: Europe and China in flames, fascism ascendant, the machines advancing amid relentless slaughter. The song descends into some of the most intense dissonance that Aaron Turner, Brian Cook and Nick Yacyshyn generate anywhere on the record.

Something like order comes back into focus ten minutes later, in “Scene 5: Breathing Fire,” as Ayewa asserts, “We had meaning / We had meaning.” The emphasis on that last word is as consoling as the past tense Ayewa uses is chilling. Through the first four minutes of the lengthy composition (“Scene 5: Breathing Fire” is the longest track on the record, at over 16 minutes), Ayewa unleashes breathless strings of lyric complexity as the band plays with powerful stop-start, doomily disjunct precision. Just after the four-minute mark, the song breaks through — the film is penetrated. The music is all onrushing thrill, Ayewa’s voice surges and snarls, “Take off running / Take off running.” She urges and inveighs. She breathes poetical fire, in answer to Garner’s cry of mortal agony. The song suggests that we all need to break through the film; just sitting back and watching is inadequate to our moment. And if we do? Take off running. The machines, the fascists and their various minions are already here.