Exploring a production process inspired by the work of Moor Mother led me to
experiment with a more abstract, emotionally-driven approach to music-making. Moor Mother is known for her genre-defying work that blends experimental sound, spoken word, and social commentary, often drawing on themes of history, identity, and resistance. Her music often defies traditional song structures, focusing instead on texture, mood, and raw expression.
To explore this approach, I first immersed myself in the music of Moor Mother, particularly her album Fetish Bones, which blends dissonant soundscapes, fractured rhythms and poetic monologues. I was fascinated by her ability to breakout of conventional structures and create music that was visceral and unfettered.Inspired by this, I set out to create a track that eschewed the typical song form.Instead of basing it on a simple melody or standard beat, I focused one experimentation. I used field-recorded ambient sounds as a basis, such as city noises and nature sounds. I also processed these recordings using distortion to create a chaotic, fragmented atmosphere. Throughout the process, I did not find spoken word clips that provided a sense of reflection of individual and collective struggles. Even though my TRACK only did something with the ambient sounds, it also gave me a new inspiration to create music in the future, where the focus of the music can be on texture, dissonance, and tension, not smooth musicality or harmonic resolution.
Moor Mother’s approach to music production offers a liberating perspective for any producer. By focusing on sound as a means of emotional and social expression, it challenges the conventions of traditional songwriting and allows a producer to experiment with unconventional techniques. Rather than aiming for catchy hooks or commercial appeal, this method encourages creating work that is raw, imperfect, and deeply tied to personal or cultural narratives. For producers, this approach opens up new creative avenues for expressing complex ideas and emotions, often using the sonic landscape itself as a vehicle for storytelling. Working in this way encourages risk-taking, invites unpredictability, and pushes the boundaries of what music can communicate. It’s a reminder that music doesn’t have to be linear or polished to be impactful; it can be fragmented, chaotic, and still powerfully resonant.