{"id":52827,"date":"2020-06-09T16:08:00","date_gmt":"2020-06-09T15:08:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pan-african-music.com\/moses-sumney-grae\/"},"modified":"2021-11-16T12:19:00","modified_gmt":"2021-11-16T10:19:00","slug":"moses-sumney-grae","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pan-african-music.com\/en\/moses-sumney-grae\/","title":{"rendered":"The magnetic songs of Moses Sumney"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\u2018Performer | Poor Person | laughing & crying\u2019. This is Moses Sumney\u2019s bio on Twitter, a space where he regularly posts his poetical and political musings, as well as images with sublime yet quite disturbing aesthetics. From the cover of his album to his avatar on social networks, the identity of the singer, author, and composer is way more profound and complex than first impressions might suggest; even the way he describes himself on Twitter sounds strangely like a pre-mortem epitaph.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A revolt against labels<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

Sumney’s got a real problem with labels. On his latest album he struggles against all the ways that others want to pin him down, including the label of \u2018R\u2019n\u2019B singer\u2019. That marker hardly covers it when you consider that he\u2019s often been found on stage at jazz and folk festivals, and with the great pop masses like at Bonaroo and Coachella, or that he has bathed in the soul of Aretha Franklin and collaborated with the songwriter Sufjan Stevens! To blur the lines even further, Sumney moved to Asheville, North Carolina, the home of the Moog keyboards mastered by Bernie Worell. Sumney invited some of these electronic tinkerers onto his track \u201cConveyor\u201d, where he tried out a new 16-track Moog vocoder. To add to all that, Asheville is also the land of Yankee Appalachian folk and country music…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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So that the listener can have time to think about the album\u2019s twenty deep and complex tracks, Sumney released gr\u00e6<\/em> in two parts: the first part \u2013 with twelve tracks \u2013 was released last winter on digital and streaming platforms, along with the very soulful music video for \u201cCut Me\u201d. The album in its entirety was released on 15th May as a magnificent double disc edition. It\u2019s been good to have several months to absorb its uniqueness.
Musically speaking, gr\u00e6<\/em> is an incredible mixture, so we’ll try not to reduce it to one universe, seeing as Sumney’s galaxy is so vast. With no fixed genre, he mixes spoken work, song, flirts with very high falsetto and lower tessitura, deals with distorted pop, intelligent indie rock, dance floor beats, and new universes of sound. In the track \u201cNeither\/Nor\u201d he links the cradle of American folk and country music \u2013 North Carolina \u2013 to the ancestral land of the banjo: Africa.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The kora meets a dancing beat and we melt into a dream world. With whichever genre he flirts, his masterful, inimitable voice is the cornerstone of each track, including those Afro-futuristic meteorites criss-crossing jazzy galaxies (\u201cColouour\u201d, in a low-key collaboration with saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings). And when Moses Sumney invites guests, such as bassist Thundercat, it’s to give them the opportunity to be heard in completely new ways \u2013 even if that does mean distorting singer Jill Scott’s soul voice until it\u2019s almost unrecognisable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018I truly believe that people who define you control you\u2019 says Ayesha K. Faines in a spoken word interlude on \u201cBoxes\u201d, a beautiful track on gr\u00e6<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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