With 2021’s Open the Gates and 2023’s Protect Your Light, Irreversible Entanglements achieved their rangiest sound, moving between free-jazz odysseys and precisely crafted, occasionally spacey interludes. Camae Ayewa, aka Moor Mother, retreated slightly from the confrontive stance taken in earlier Irreversible Entanglements projects and her solo work (she hadn’t yet recorded the blistering collaboration with Sumac, 2025’s The Film). Still lambasting history’s oppressors, she also offered empathetic and empowering words to the downtrodden.
With their new album (and second on the jazz label Impulse! Records), Irreversible Entanglements again venture into breathtaking improvs, also demonstrating an increased interest in restraint. “Don’t Lose Your Head”, for example, launches with a centrifugal percussion part courtesy of Tcheser Holmes. Keir Neuringer on sax, meanwhile, unspools a more centripetal or anchoring melodic line. Ayewa offers mystical cum activistic cum therapeutic insights. As the track progresses, the musicians achieve a certain harmony, then veer into adrenalized discordancies as if to illustrate existential and socio-cultural novae. Toward the track’s end, they realign complementarily.
With “Vibrate Higher”, Ayewa strikes a balance between a high-minded Michele Obama: “when they go low, we go high” and a mercurial Angela Davis: “I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept” (with faint hints of a volatile Nina Simone: “I was never a non-violent person”). The band move through serrated dreamscapes and corralled noise explorations. Airy sax parts contrast with a brassy trumpet. Holmes’s drums verge on the ambient and arrhythmic, Luke Stewart’s bass stomping through the track.
On the fast-paced “Panamanian Fight Song”, a horn refrain slices through busy percussion, launches into outer space, then lands back in the refrain. “We Know” is built around striking trumpet-and-sax interactions. “Keep Going” brims with fragmented melodic lines superimposed on austere backgrounds. Potent tensions highlight the way in which individual desire (for opportunity, equality, self-actualization) smacks up against institutionalized oppression – age-old infrastructures/hierarchies that keep a few people on top, a bunch more on the bottom.
Opener “Juntos Vencemos” and closer “We Overcome” feature guest artist Helado Negro (Roberto Carlos Lange). With both tracks, Lange adds sobriety, even vulnerability, to the band’s sound, his echoey moans occurring as refreshing expressions of grief (effectively bookending the band’s intellectualism and Ayewa’s steaminess). Busy drums, moody melodic lines, and horn blasts converge, straddling a line between the sultry and the equanimous.
With Future Present Past, Irreversible Entanglements continue to integrate abandon and containment, revamping free-jazz milestones as well as rock and noise precedents. Ayewa calls out historical and ongoing hypocrisies, acknowledges the reality of intergenerational trauma, and advocates for the marginalized and exploited. Mining archetypal yet still fertile paradoxes, Irreversible Entanglements have much to teach us about inspiration, self-awareness, and truth-telling.
