In Circuit City, people live in an apartment complex owned by a corporation and search for a way out. Moor Mother, the artist Camae Ayewa, made the 2020 work as a theatrical song cycle in four acts. Its setting is a living room, a place where private life ought to have room to unfold. The ownership structure makes that privacy uncertain. Technology has entered the housing arrangement, and escape requires more than stepping through a door. The residents imagine a machine that could move them through time toward a safer place.
The artist's release page describes the work as part musical, part choreopoem and part play. That combination is exact. A song can repeat a demand; a poem can compress a history; a theatrical scene can put bodies under pressure together. Ayewa brings those modes into one designed situation. The future is not a decorative skyline around the characters. It is what they are trying to make while living inside someone else's system.
Ayewa is a Philadelphia-rooted poet, musician, performer and educator whose work moves through noise, jazz, hip-hop, theater and visual practice. She co-founded Black Quantum Futurism with Rasheedah Phillips. The collective's own account describes an interdisciplinary practice concerned with time, memory and the creation of alternate futures from Black and African diasporic knowledge. Moor Mother's records give that work a fiercely individual voice, but the collective project matters to understanding her art. Her idea of time is not only a lyric or a sound effect. It is a method for organizing history, community and action.
A machine inside a living room
Circuit City unfolds in four acts: “Working Machine,” “Circuit Break,” “Time of No Time” and “No More Wires.” The recorded version's track listing gives each act room, from roughly nine to thirteen minutes. The titles move from labor and mechanism toward rupture and release. They do not promise that escape is easy. “Working Machine” can name the equipment required by the characters, but it can also describe workers caught within a system. “Circuit Break” suggests both a technical failure and an interruption of a social circuit that keeps power flowing in one direction.
In a 2020 interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer, Ayewa described residents trying to leave and a time-machine portal that might take them somewhere safer. The concept grows from housing rather than from a fascination with gadgets. Corporate ownership of a home can make the ordinary calendar feel coercive: rent comes due, a lease ends, redevelopment advances, a neighborhood's past is made hard to retrieve. Ayewa makes a temporal escape plan out of those pressures. Time travel becomes a way to imagine agency where a resident's present is administered by someone else.
The stage work also asks what a voice can do under such conditions. Ayewa's recorded version brings in musicians and performers including Luke Stewart, Keir Neuringer, Tcheser Holmes, Aquiles Navarro and others, as the release credits show. The group supplies a collective field of sound around her poetry. Scenic designer Taryn Jones gave that future a room, while lighting designer Kae Greenberg shaped what its occupants and audience could see. The architecture and light carry part of the drama alongside Ayewa’s text and the ensemble’s sound. The living room must be built so that its apparent familiarity can become unsettling.
The title's resemblance to a retail chain is useful without requiring a single pun to carry the work. A “circuit” can be an electrical path, a network of institutions or a route repeated until it feels inescapable. “City” places that network at the scale of public life. The four acts make movement through the circuit audible as a sequence, even when the route out remains uncertain. Ayewa does not present technology as automatically liberating. The machine has to be imagined and used by people already facing a structure of ownership.
This is why Circuit City belongs in a history of Afrofuturist theater as well as music. It puts speculative technology in the hands of residents rather than a lone inventor in a laboratory. Its imagined portal is valuable because it dramatizes a question about present conditions: who can move, and who is forced to remain where someone else has placed them?
History that can be entered twice
Ayewa's first Moor Mother album, Fetish Bones, was released in 2016. She has described moving through histories of racial violence while making it. In a first-person interview with Pitchfork, she said the Black Quantum Futurism approach gave her agency to revisit a traumatic event without accepting trauma as the only available relationship to it. The claim is about artistic method, not a promise that revisiting an atrocity can make it harmless. A historical record can hurt; an artist may still choose how to enter, leave and reorganize the encounter.
That choice is audible in the way Ayewa works across abrasive noise and language. The Inquirer interview describes the urgency of the early record and the poetry running through it. A harsh sound can prevent a listener from treating the historical reference as a comfortable lesson. Spoken words make particular injuries harder to dissolve into atmosphere. The work does not let a smooth musical surface reassure the audience that the past has been mastered.
The Black Quantum Futurism collective describes past and future as active in the present rather than sealed-off zones. In music, this can mean an old voice, a contemporary beat and an imagined event existing together in one track. In a community project, it can mean recovering neighborhood memory so residents can plan from a fuller account of where they live. The two practices have different stakes, but they share an insistence that time is not simply what a clock measures.
Ayewa and Rasheedah Phillips co-founded Black Quantum Futurism. Their collective developed projects including the Community Futures Lab and the Black Women Temporal Portal. Their names point toward spaces in which other people can contribute memories and visions. The work does not only propose that an artist may travel imaginatively through time; it asks how a community might claim authority over its own timelines.
There is a risk of making “quantum” sound like a scientific endorsement of every artistic claim. Ayewa and Phillips use it as part of a speculative, philosophical and practical framework, not as a laboratory result proving a literal portal will open. Their work draws from Black and African diasporic accounts of time alongside physics and ritual. Its artistic force lies in how those ideas change the questions people ask about memory, land and future access.
An encyclopedia of air
The 2021 album Black Encyclopedia of the Air has the scale of a reference work in its title, but air will not stay fixed on a page. Ayewa spoke in the Pitchfork interview about looking through difficult histories and finding beauty as well as pain. The title suggests an archive that must be breathed, heard and circulated. It can contain traces without pretending to close the record.
An encyclopedia usually promises order: entries can be alphabetized, cited and returned to. Ayewa's music unsettles that promise. A sound arrives in time and vanishes as it is heard, unless the listener repeats the recording or carries a phrase into memory. The album's title makes that difference productive. Historical knowledge is not only in documents; it is also in voices, rhythms and acts of attention that have been excluded from official catalogs.
This project forms a bridge to Jazz Codes, released in 2022. Ayewa described writing more than a hundred pages of poems in response to jazz musicians and their histories before asking producer Olof Melander for musical material. In her TIDAL interview, she describes the poems as a form of thanks to elders and collaborators. The record developed from that written archive into a densely collaborative album. Its making reverses the assumption that music simply inspires a later critical essay: here, poetry and research generated the need for sound.
“Code” can mean a secret, a rule or a structure by which a practice is understood. Ayewa uses the plural. The record listens toward jazz as a lineage of different people and methods rather than a single protected style. That does not mean anything can be called jazz without accountability. In the TIDAL conversation, she pushes against music that wears the costume of liberation while avoiding its demands. Her record responds by giving named artists, ideas and histories space inside new compositions.
Names inside Jazz Codes
The track “ODE TO MARY” refers to pianist Mary Lou Williams. The TIDAL account identifies Jason Moran's piano and an archival recording of Williams' voice within it. The structure makes a conversation across time without pretending Williams is present in the studio. An archival voice can be sampled, but it also requires the new music to make room for someone whose work preceded it. Moran's played response and Ayewa's tribute bring different kinds of attention to the same figure.
“GOLDEN LADY” is connected to singers including Betty Carter and Abbey Lincoln, with Melanie Charles' voice contributing melody, according to TIDAL. “DUST TOGETHER” features Wolf Weston and a line of thought about remembrance. These works are not a list of historical names set to tracks. Each makes a relation between a current collaborator and an earlier presence. The title Jazz Codes is therefore enacted as a series of encounters: a pianist plays near a recorded elder's voice, a singer enters a dedication to other singers, a poem asks how memory survives the body.
The roster of collaborators is broad. Ayewa works with flutist Nicole Mitchell, saxophonist Keir Neuringer, trumpeter Aquiles Navarro, bassist Luke Stewart and drummer Tcheser Holmes, among others. Her free-jazz collective Irreversible Entanglements also participates. The album's social structure matters as much as its references. It honors a community by asking members of that community to make the new work, not merely by writing their names into a lyric.
The record is not wholly reverent. Its titles include “RAP JASM,” “BLUES AWAY” and “THOMAS STANLEY JAZZCODES OUTRO.” The movement among rap, blues, spoken thought and jazz is part of the argument. These forms have different histories and pressures, yet Ayewa can place them in an active sequence. In the TIDAL interview, Thomas Stanley is credited with questioning the word “jazz” itself. That question belongs on an album whose title promises codes: who named the music, who has used the name, and what happens when artists work beyond its boundaries?
The album's affectionate moments matter too. If every encounter with the past were made only through accusation, a future would inherit little space for pleasure. Ayewa's dedications and collaborations let gratitude take a formal role beside anger. Her use of melody and singing does not signal a retreat from political urgency. It can give another kind of relation to the people whose work made her own possible.
The clock in the neighborhood
Black Quantum Futurism's community work gives a grounded counterpart to these albums. The collective's site describes projects devoted to recovering local memory, telling counterhistories and making spaces for people to envision change. Ayewa has spoken of time as something over which Black communities need more agency. In an interview with Time, she explained that reclaiming time includes the ability to connect ancestral knowledge with decisions about a present and future life.
That idea becomes concrete in housing. A developer's timetable and a resident's timetable may have little in common. One counts investment cycles; the other includes the years required to grow relationships, raise children and remember neighbors. If a place is remade without its residents' consent, part of the loss is control over the pace of change. Circuit City turns this conflict into theater, while the collective's lab and portal projects create settings where people can articulate their own temporal claims.
Ayewa's music is not a policy plan for housing or an explanation of physics. It is an art of pressure and possibility. It can make an audience feel the difficulty of moving through a rigid system, then hear fragments of a different rhythm. The collective's work carries that question into meetings, archives and neighborhood spaces. Together they refuse to treat the future as a slogan that can be pasted over present material conditions.
Krull's Futuristic Dreams asks people with ties to the Democratic Republic of Congo what conditions would let their communities flourish and how another future might be pictured. Ayewa's Philadelphia-rooted practice addresses different histories, but it also asks who gets to name a possible future when resources, homes and public stories are controlled by others. The answers begin in voices that already know the place.
More than one way forward
Across these works, Ayewa repeatedly changes the scale of time. Fetish Bones enters historical violence without agreeing that inherited trauma must define every later moment. Circuit City turns a housing conflict into a time-machine drama. Black Encyclopedia of the Air imagines an archive made from sounds that resist stillness. Jazz Codes lets living collaborators address predecessors across recordings, poems and new music. Black Quantum Futurism creates communal settings in which residents can record memory and propose other ways to move forward.
The variety can seem hard to contain within one genre. Ayewa has said as much in a Barbican interview, resisting a single musical box. The coherence is in her treatment of time and agency, not in a repeated surface. Noise, theater, jazz and a neighborhood archive may sound unlike one another because they answer different conditions. Each asks whose clock governs the room and what happens when someone starts keeping time differently.
The residents of Circuit City search for a portal, but Ayewa's work does not wait for a fictional machine to be built. Its practical wager is that memory can be gathered, sound can move people, and communities can dispute the timelines imposed upon them. No record alone can guarantee a safer destination. Moor Mother's art makes the demand to imagine one inseparable from the work of changing the present route.