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  • Blog 4 – Moor Mother Track Analysis

    INTRO

    I chose to analyse the track “By the Light” from the album “Fetish Bones” by Moor Mother. Moor Mother is a poet, musician and activist from Maryland. Her sound blends spoken word, jazz, experimental hip-hop and political expression. She is one half of the Black Quantum Futurism a group that explores Afro-futurism through sound, poetry and archival research.

    CONTEXT & POLITICAL THEMES

    The track is rooted in Black radical tradition and deals with issues such as the reshaping of historical memory in favour of racist narratives that erase the trauma of the Black community. She uses her lyrics as political testimony rather than entertainment, expressing her own political identity in resistance to the views of the oppressor’s narrative.

    AESTHETICS & SONIC LAYERING

    The song’s mood is tense and dark, beginning with a filtered spoken voice, talking with a cadence of a horror movie, with urgency and repeating the same sentence over and over : “I’m right by the light, I’m right by the light…” like she is announcing a prophecy. And to enhance this effect even more on the public, the song does not follow a linear pattern of instruments laid down nicely and in order with each other, the drums come in the middle of the verse, there are sounds of distorted pads or noise coming in and out randomly. The gritty texture of the drums, especially the snare mixed with white noise together with the distorted bass contribute to darkens the track even further. Timbre and texture play a huge role in this track as everything is focused on distorted sound, pure noise, and processed or screamed vocals.

    PRODUCTION TECHNIQUES

    In the mix, I notice that the dry vocals sit on top with a tape-like compression, with background textures sitting underneath. Distortion is the main effect throughout the whole track but also important are saturation and crackle, adding that tape-hiss characteristic of vintage recordings and also common in lo-fi recordings. The lack of quantisation is contributes to the track non-linear, unstable structure.

    EXPERIMENTAL RECORDINGS:

    A central element in Moor Mother’s work is the use of poetry as the main component rather than harmony or melody. Her narrative is fragmented between spoken word and rapping, which creates a structure that forms around of text rather than following a typical verse and chorus organisation. This anti-structure that enhances the political protest through sonic resistance to music conventions. This intentionally creates an unstable sound world mixing improvisation (common in jazz music), noise and spoken word.

    CONCLUSION

    Moor Mother influences me to show resistance creatively, not only through my lyrics, but also my sounds and how I can use them to tell a story too. This widens my arsenal of political expressions and now that I also understand that my music, in a wanted or unwanted way, always carries a political message, I should take responsibility and shape it with intention.

    HARVARD REFERENCES

    • Youtu.be. (2025). Available at: https://youtu.be/VPWi2wJELh4 [Accessed 31 Oct. 2025].
    • ‌Duplan, A. (2017). Moor Mother Explains Black Quantum Futurism. [online] VICE. Available at: https://www.vice.com/en/article/moor-mother-explains-black-quantum-futurism/.
    • Darville, J. (2021). Moor Mother on collaboration, community, and the power of sampling. [online] The FADER. Available at: https://www.thefader.com/2021/09/21/moor-mother-on-collaboration-community-and-the-power-of-sampling? [Accessed 31 Oct. 2025].
    • ‌‌Moor Mother. (2016). By The Light. [online] Available at: https://moormother.bandcamp.com/track/by-the-light [Accessed 10 Dec. 2025].
    • ‌Youtu.be. (2025). Available at: https://youtu.be/LO4S_1rNP6Y [Accessed 10 Dec. 2025].
    • ‌BGD. (2016). Tears Into Flames: BGD Music of the Month Featuring Camae Ayewa of Moor Mother. [online] Available at: https://www.bgdblog.org/2016/06/camae-ayewa-of-moor-mother/ [Accessed 10 Dec. 2025].
    • ‌Joshi, T. (2025). Moor Mother: Poetic Justice. [online] Crack Magazine. Available at: https://crackmagazine.net/article/long-reads/moor-mother-poetic-justice/ [Accessed 10 Dec. 2025].
    • ‌Beaumont-Thomas, B. (2017). Moor Mother: ‘We have yet to truly understand what enslavement means’. [online] the Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/apr/20/moor-mother-hip-hop-artist-camae-ayewa-black-experience-civil-rights-interview [Accessed 10 Dec. 2025].
    • ‌obo. (n.d.). Afrofuturism. [online] Available at: https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/obo-9780190221911/obo-9780190221911-0004.xml.
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  • Blog 7: Breakcore Track Analysis

    INTRO

    For this blog I chose to analyse ‘Very Noise’ from the Spirituality and Distortion (2020) album by the French multi-instrumentalist and producer Gautier Serre, better known as Igorrr. This tracks has a hybrid sound experimenting with breakcore and metal music, something that I’ll talk about as also the production behind it.

    AESTHETICS / GENRE FUSION

    The track is chaotic but somehow it ends up being funny by the way the main line is repeated all over the song – a line that sounds similar to videogame’s music to me. It has the unpredictable drums of breakcore, then the guitar joins repeating the melodic line that the drums are making. And now that we have the metal riffs and the chaotic drums, he goes unto playing a bar and then finish them up in a different way in each time. He is creative with the ends of each lines using a variety of artistic and sonic resources such as instrument fills, operatic chants or even a chainsaw cutting a gas tank.

    PRODUCTION TECHNIQUES

    For the drums, he chopped with extreme precision and create each bar purposefully, different from traditional sampling-and- looping. For the guitar and bass he adds distortion to create this crunchy and dark sound, typical of metal guitars. This is a strong contrast with cartoon-like effects that we hear throughout the song, a bold decision that shows his creative mindset.

    SONIC IDENTITY

    This controlled chaos in Igorrr’s song ‘Very Noise‘ is not new, is one of his signature style. And to achieve this unpredictability he stands in the opposite side of minimalism, being a maximalist in music (using a wide range of techniques). Another way he does it, it’s by switching mood quickly: he is playing quiet and then change too loud and fast, the sounds are soft and dreamy, now it’s harsh and heavily distorted.

    CONTEXT / ARTISTIC APPROACH

    Serre grew up with baroque music, black and death metal but he never found a genre that mixed all of his passions, until he discovered breakcore, where rules doesn’t exist. This inspired him to create his own sound, genre-less as he says in many interview. Just a compound of his own personal tastes.

    CONCLUSION

    This tracks Igorrr’s experimental fusion in a exaggerated way, having multiple influences in one song. The fast pace of the sound and the weirds sounds makes it a unique piece of art.

    Bibliography: 

    ‌Ox Fanzine, Solingen, Deutschland (2020). Interview. [online] Ox-fanzine.de. Available at: https://www.ox-fanzine.de/interview/igorrr-11274 [Accessed 12 Dec. 2025]. 

  • Blog 2 – Music Analysis (Queerness) 

    INTRO

    For Queer music analysis I’ve chosen Piel by Arca from the album Arca 2017.

    Arca, aka Alejandra Ghersi, is a Venezuelan non-binary trans experimental artist who has worked as a producer for artists such as FKA Twigs, Kanye West and Rosalia amongst others, but her self-titled album “Arca” 2017 marked a transformation point in her identity and artistic direction. This album is identity centred as it reflects her exploration of gender and self-hood, and also contain queer aesthetics. Most of the tracks could be categorised as experimental pop.

    CONTEXT & QUEERNESS

    Arca’s music portrays the topics of vulnerability, dysphoria, softness and shame. An example of this traits is shown in the lyric “quitame la piel de ayer” (remove yesterday’s skin from me). This shows the discomfort with her body while exposing her vulnerability to the public, the use of word ‘skin’ also creates an intimacy with the listeners. Another important feature of this track related to queer embodiment is the use of a non-binary voice, a gender fluidity that represents the current state of the artist.

    AESTHETICS

    The song has an ambience of minimalism and ethereal timbre. At first, she starts humming like in a “bedtime lullaby ” (Lozano, Pitchfork, 2017), the voice is stretched, breathy and almost whispered, and together with the slow ambient soft pads creates an intimate sonic space. In contrast, something that stood out for me was how she uses the sound of microphone’s feedback which is usually a very unsettling sound in such an intimate song. But overall, the elements all work together to create this feeling of vulnerability and softness, as if the artist is about to break.

    PRODUCTION TECHNIQUES

    On a more technical side, we have a minimalistic approach to arrangement with just the use of vocals, mainly one voice and soft pads in the background with a lot of spatial reverb (long decay reverb) which creates this ethereal feeling. And for the effects, also minimal, she only modulates the pitch of the vocals in one section to present a slightly altered gender and use slow attacks/soft transients to create softness. The track uses extremely sparse arrangement, relying mostly on voice processing and atmospheric pads.

    SONIC IDENTITY

    Arca’s known for mixing extreme sounds with fragility, you can see this in my previous mention of using mic’s feedback in this track full of soft sounds. Another key aspect of Arca’s music in this track is the trans-feminine vocal expression which are central to her queer sonic identity.

    CONCLUSION

    Arca’s music makes me understand how to use the elements of softness and vulnerability to create this space of intimacy where the truth can be revealed and can offer a political challenge which is often related with strong, harsh protest and violence. This inspires me to think that I could express ideas that may cause controversy with more freedom knowing that I could do it in a more kind and approachable way. In the end, queer music is all about challenging conventional structures in both music and society.

    BIBLIOGRAPHY:

    • Papermag.com. (2025). Page Restricted. [online] Available at: https://www.papermag.com/arca-transformation? [Accessed 10 Dec. 2025].
    • Pristauz, J. (n.d.). In Conversation with Arca. [online] GLAMCULT.COM. Available at: https://www.glamcult.com/articles/in-conversation-with-arca/.
    • Lozano, K. (2017). Arca. [online] Pitchfork. Available at: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23063-arca/ [Accessed 10 Dec. 2025].
    • ‌Genius. (2017). Arca – Piel. [online] Available at: https://genius.com/Arca-piel-lyrics [Accessed 10 Dec. 2025].

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  • Blog 5 – Politics in Music Production (Workshop Reflection)

    This week in class, we explored activism in music through a composition task inspired by Moor Mother. In this exercise, we were asked to create a track that incorporated a meaningful speech. I paired up with Axel.

    We decided to create a jungle-inspired track on Logic using JF Kennedy’s inaugural speech as vocal material. We chose a section of JFK’s inaugural speech where he talks about freedom and responsibility.

    We used a YouTube to MP3 converter to download it, then we cut the specific bits of speech that we wanted and left it raw and unedited.

    Once we had selected and edited the speech, we moved on to creating the music.

    Axel suggested the idea of making a jungle beat. At first, I was unsure because I was unfamiliar with the genre, but I thought it was a great opportunity to try something new.

    We started by downloading a jungle drum loop from a sample library, then layered additional kicks and snares to give the rhythm more impact. This worked really well, and the beat started to come alive. Once the percussion was done, we focused on harmonies and bass. We chose all native plug-ins from Logic’s library, looking for the common sounds of the genre.

    First, we created the harmonies by playing the chords with an edited version of the electric piano where it had chorus and slight distortion already in the audio effects section of the inspector. After that, we layered it with a pad and a gliding bass under the chords to achieve a richer and fuller sound. Lastly, we added the bass to enhance the rhythm. We went for an 80’s synth type of bass.

    Because we spent time focusing on sound selection we didn’t have time to mix, we also didn’t plan it to be honest, so next time we should take into account the time given for the task in the lesson and allocate the last 15 minutes to balance the volume, control dynamics and quickly make a very rough mix

    Overall, the collaboration went well, I had the opportunity to learn a new genre of music I was unfamiliar with and also to work collaboratively with others.

    I also learned the importance of purposefully choosing the message of my songs as it’s not possible to avoid that given that people will always have an interpretation for the lyrics so it’s better to have a direction when it comes to political messages in music.

  • Blog 3 – Reflection on Queer Music Group Practical Task

    This week in class, we explored queer music though an experimental composition task inspired by Throbbing Gristle.

    In the queer music exercise, where we were asked to create a track inspired in “Throbbing Gristle”, I paired up with Esther.

    Rapidly we found a common direction. Inspired by the track “Hamburguer Lady , we found that the one of the most striking features was its complete rejection of conventional music structure. It didn’t have a typical ABAB or ABABCB form, in fact they deliberately sought to challenge musical traditions.

    As the vocalist Genesis P-Orridge said in an interview: “In order to do something that seems new you have to strip away everything that’s traditional…You have to get everything that’s normal and break it”.

    Following that idea we decided to not include verses and choruses and we avoid using quantisation, just fluid tempo. This matched the unsettling tone of the song.

    Another thing we borrowed from our reference track was the use of heavily distorted pads. We chose a pad, then add the guitar amp effect to give it a more crunchy sound and to emphasise the crunchiness we used Logic’s Candy Fuzz plug in. Adding distortion created a sense of confusion, tension and discomfort.

    This experience made me realise how sound design can help communicate some abstract concepts rather than just relying in melody and harmony.

    Overall, this exercise expanded my creative mindset and tight me that breaking the rules is not always a mistake.

    BIBLIOGRAPHY:

    LEE, GAVIN. “Queer Music Theory.” Music Theory Spectrum, vol. 42, no. 1, 2020, pp. 143–53. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/27141588. Accessed 7 Nov. 2025.

    Thecreativeindependent.com. (2017). Genesis P-Orridge on destroying preconceptions – The Creative Independent. [online] Available at: https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/genesis-p-orridge-on-destroying-preconceptions/ [Accessed 10 Nov. 2025].

    Smith, E. (2016). Lucid Definitions for 10 Hazy Musical Terms. [online] Houston Press. Available at: https://www.houstonpress.com/music/lucid-definitions-for-10-hazy-musical-terms-8531645/ [Accessed 10 Nov. 2025].

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  • Blog 1 – Skills Audit

    As a music production student, I would define my current style as learning and implementing immediately or creating something on the spot and seeking a reference to follow. 
     
    For example, I may be messing around with my guitar or piano and I will find something that I like, a melody, a chord progression or even just a percussive rhythm.  

    Once I figured it out, I will start recording it and I’ll listen back to it; then it will most likely remind me of a song of a genre of a style of arrangement. I will go and listen to that reference and then try to catch the “formula” (as I believe every producer’s style is just a formula they apply to songs and that they polish over time) and apply it to my small piece. 
     
    Another way I do it, talking about formula, is I just listen to the arrangements of a genre, and then imitate them but with different chords or sounds and then on top of that my own ideas pop out, like using a template. 

    These methods come from the mentality of first learning what the masters do and once I know the recipes by memory, I let the music in me flow wherever it wants. I learned that from great guitarists, such as Brian May who used to study other guitarist’s licks and then give them their own identity. 

    Now I’ll talk about my strengths, the first one that comes to mind is Logic. 
    I have got used to Logic, I learn most of the commands and tools that it has, I do not use all, but it was helpful to learn more in depth about my DAW. It has improved my workflow tremendously. 
     

    I also consider myself to have a good ear and a good taste (but who doesn’t think so).   When I say good ear I mean good listening skills, I can differentiate all instruments in a song easily, notice layers and textures and see a pattern of how they are organised (mix) 
    This has been very helpful at the time to detect what it’s wrong in my mixes. 
     
     

    When it comes to my weakness, I have the first one very clear: mixing.  
    As I said before, I have a good ear to detect what it’s wrong with my mixes and see how other have done theirs but my limited knowledge about compressor, equaliser and other tools don’t allow me to implement the mistakes that I see in mines because I do not know how.  
     
    And my other big struggle to overcome as a producer is collaboration. I need to reach out to the world for more feedback as I feel that would make my progress much faster, listening advice from peers, observing how they do things and start to get exposed even if my music it’s not entirely how I wanted it to.  

    After looking at my creative process, strengths and weaknesses, I would like to set three goals for the end of this season that I think it will improve my production  dramatically: 
     
    The first one is mixing, as I think it will give me the confidence boost to show my music and over all to make it sound more professional.  

     
    Number two is collaboration, I always had the mentality to start working on what I study at university while I’m studying, not wait until I finish and now, I’m ready to do it, ready to receive criticism, to fail and thrive the struggles of producer career. 

    And lastly, I would like to create my own systems like the ones I talk before. Internalise the most “formulas” so I can and start writing down my own methods inspire by all the failure and trial. Have it in a PDF, word or notebook, but make a manual that maximises my production.  

    Skills Audit 

    Area Self-rating (1–5) Comments / Examples 
    Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs) Ableton, Logic, etc.  4 I have found my way around to make the most out of my sessions with things such as learning the commands that I used most commonly and organizing my projects. 
    Recording Techniques microphones, gain staging, audio setup  2.5  I know the basics, cables, sound tests and listing things before jumping on the studio, but I yet don’t know how to use the mixer at its best. 
    MIDI Sequencing & Programming  3.5  I have learned enough to be good but my pace at it could be better 
    Sampling & Synthesis  4  I have put my effort to it lately and I’m capable  
    Mixing & Effects Processing  2 That’s probably my weakest point; I urgently need to improve it. 
    Sound Design & Creative Processing  3 I am not bad at it but not advanced either. 
    Critical Listening & Analysis  5  I am confident about it and if I could implement the problems I detect in my production, especially mixing, it would be better. 
    Collaboration & Communication  3  I never tried with other people in my class but recently I did something outside school, and it went well. 
    Organization & Workflow  4 I have found a system that work effectively and allows me to get the most of every production session