What happens when you combine SUMAC: a band that uses the volume, distortion, and guitar-centric approach of metal to make music that has the malleability of jazz and textural exploration of noise with Moor Mother: a poet and sound artist that has deconstructed hip hop to a point where it’s less about rhyme and rhythm (though obviously both are present in her work) and more about oratorical cadence and power? The Film is an album that takes attributes of both artists’ work and finds common ground in shifting musical patterns, and expressive force. The record is a musical thumbing of their noses at the more traditional approaches of their respective fields, an innovative, powerhouse of an album.
The Film’s moniker speaks to the fact that it is conceived and delivered as a complete album, a full story or narrative. Moor Mother puts it best: “The idea is to create a moment outside of the convention. This is a work of art. Thinking about the work as a Film, instead of an album or a collection of songs. This task is impossible in an industry that wants to force everything into a box of consumption. You won’t understand or get the full picture until the artwork is completed. This work is developing and is requesting more agency within the creative process.” The Film does have clear themes running throughout – again Moor Mother expounds: “the themes are universal in nature – land – displacement – the climate – human rights and freedoms – war and peace – the idea of running away from the many violent forces and horrific systems of man and empire.”
Heavy, holy, hypnotizing – beyond existence, beyond the fettered constraints of normality, past the false notions of the indoctrinated disguised as the organic, planets form; the detritus of cosmic stuff merges into galaxies, into something that can sound like it’s populated by suns. The Film is just such a work, a nebulitic collaboration between SUMAC and Moor Mother.
The Film was recorded at Studio Litho in Seattle with Scott Evans. The album includes appearances by guest vocalists Kyle Kidd, Sovie, and Candice Hoyes. SUMAC and Moor Mother will be playing select dates worldwide together, including a performance at Roadburn Festival just ahead of album release. This double album is packaged in a custom obi designed by Aaron Turner featuring paintings by Turner and art concepts by Moor Mother.
Nobody told me. Nobody, nobody, nobody.
Nobody told me.
Nobody told me.
Nobody told me, nobody.
Nobody told me.
Nobody.
Nobody told me.
Nobody told me.
Nobody told me.
Nobody told me.
Space travel galactic mind. Captive needs space. Need to escape from the time matrix. Religious hatred. Love has been reinstated. Has been reinstated.
Nobody told me.
Nobody told me.
Nobody told me.
Space.
Nobody told me.
So long they’ve been hating, waiting, debating how to keep you enslaved.
So long they’ve been hating, waiting, debating how to keep you enslaved.
Better lose your mind, lose your mind, lose your mind, lose your mind.
Run away, better lose your mind, hurt off, dust off, hate off, change off, devil off, better run and lose your mind.
Nobody told me.
Nobody told me.
Nobody told me
Change your mind. Devil off, better run and lose your mind.
Nobody told me.
Love has been reinstated. Nobody told me. Nobody told me. Nobody told me.
Nobody told me how love was supposed to be. How peace was supposed to be. How peace was supposed to be. To be. Nobody told me how peace was, how peace was supposed to be. How love, how peace, how peace, how peace, how love, how peace…
Nobody told me how peace…
“There are plenty of rappers who fans claim “no one else is rapping like,” but this dignification is actually true of Sharif” – Rolling Stone
“There’s something in the water in New Jersey — a close-to-deadly concentration of wormwood, perhaps, or of fresh blood drained from an inexhaustible supply of sacrificia virgins. Whatever it is, Fatboi Sharif and Roper Williams are drinking from the tap” – FADER
“If a rap posse formed from today’s up-and-comers who favor dusty loops and heady verses, Sharif could be the ODB.” – Complex
“No two songs are alike, but the fragmented verses and horror flick references from each one form a twisted mosaic of Lynchian strangeness, where nothing is too strange, sacred,
or taboo.” – SPIN
“I want to create my own genre.” – Fatboi Sharif
Sharif doesn’t look at his performances with the traditional lens that a normal rapper does, bukt treats the live show as a spiritual experience where Sharif and the crowd become married through raging and serenity. With being inspired as a child by Nine Inch Nails, White Zombie, and Parliament Funkadelic it’s hard to put Fatboi in a box. Grit over glamour is the name of his game. Production wise, once he finds the right instrumental that speaks to him in his language, he’ll sit with it for a few weeks and sleep to it on repeat. he’ll dream and see certain visions, colors, and shapes that create an image on top of the production canvas. This keeps his music everlasting.
The premiere EP “Ape Twin” was the Garden State Gargoyle’s first offering to the world showcasing his storytelling and descriptive penmanship with tracks such as “Breakin Nooze,” “Cloud Atlas,” and the foreshadowing first collaboration with producer Roper Williams (AKAI SOLO, Pink Siifu, YOUR OLD DROOG) on the deceased mermaid’s love letter “Egyptian Mermaid Lust.” After this collaboration and forming a friendship connecting through the shared interest in music, movies, and mutual hate of mediocrity, Fatboi Sharif & Roper William’s GANDHI LOVES CHILDREN was brought into the world. On Gandhi Loves Children, Roper created a different world for each song leaving room for Sharif to expand on his audio spiral soup of thought.
Coming off his breakthrough album, leaving an impression on many new listeners, Fatboi followed up with a 6 track EP Cyber City Society. Produced entirely by phenomenal stream-of-consciousness dart thrower “Lungs/Lonesword” of the Tase Grip collective. Lonesword’s production is its own sub-genre of underground music that became the perfect soundscape for Sharif’s imagination to run rampant on.
2022 brought us Fatboi Sharif & noface’s cult classic, Preaching in Havana, courtesy of boutique label Purple Tape Pedigree. An album about fear, and life, and death, and soul searching– finding God in babylon.
Fatboi Sharif teams back up with producer Roper Williams for their 2023 EP, Planet Unfaithful. His remarkable flow, something between a possession and a bad trip, matches well with the swirling samples. Bruiser Wolf and Elucid lend a hand as collaborators on this project as well. Later that year Sharif collaborated with Steel Tipped Dove for the Decay LP, released on Backwoodz Studioz. “An anomaly. In an era of microwave projects and email collaborations, the duo spent more than a year writing, recording and mixing Decay together in Dove’s Brooklyn studio. At a moment when many independent hip-hop projects are sonically predictable, easily categorized, and derivative, Decay is unapologetically experimental,” says the Backwoodz label website. To cap off the year, Sharif scratched off a bucket list accomplishment by bringing one of his idols, Bigg Jus, back outside to collaborate on the two-man mission EP that is, 2023’s Insomniac Missile Launcher. Fully produced by Bigg Jus, who also rapped some of his best verses on each track.
Accomplishing one of his life goals didn’t stop Fatboi from coming right back at the top of 2024 with Roper Williams to deliver one of his best and most unique projects to date. Billed as an album but dressed as a single on the DSPs, Fatboi & Roper’s “Something About Shirley” in a concise, dense roller coaster soundscape with a 10-minute run time. Later in the year Sharif joined teams with multi talented Duncecap for their exciting EP – Psychedelics Wrote the Bible. This trip only lasts for about 11 minutes, but like any intense psychedelic experience, your sense of time will get totally warped by it anyway. Lyrically he’s inspired to paint pictures like Stephen King, Oliver Stone, Stanley Kubrick, Clive Barker, David Lynch, and Ernest Dickerson. A literature titan and comic villain-like figure, Fatboi is one of the most charismatic and embracing individuals you’ll have the pleasure of meeting.
