IRREVERSIBLE ENTANGLEMENTS “Future Present Past”

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ARTIST

Irreversible Entanglements

ALBUM TITLE

“Future Present Past”

LABEL

Impulse!

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This is a kind of sonic geology in which time settles in layers – like red dust on forgotten records, like soot on cities that knew the blues before they knew asphalt. Every album by Irreversible Entanglements feels like a fragment of an Afro-diasporic archive, pulsing in the present while drawing its energy from roots so deep they resemble incandescent fossils.

Moor Mother’s voice does not simply deliver poetry – it reopens wounds. What she offers is not spoken word so much as a sharpened blade cutting into the deepest layers of the collective unconscious. Beneath her, the band moves like a fracture running through the earth’s crust. The saxophone traces nervous trajectories, the drums disrupt linear movement, while the bass circles relentlessly around them – dark, weighty and entirely free of self-indulgence.

Hovering in the background is the cosmic shadow of Sun Ra, although here the spaceship never departs. Instead, it remains suspended above a neighbourhood in flames. There are also echoes of the incendiary language of The Last Poets, refracted through a contemporary sensibility in which anger has become sharper, clearer and more analytical.

“We Know” is perhaps the piece that most vividly embodies the album’s central idea. Past, present and future are not presented as a sequence. They coexist simultaneously. African American history has never unfolded as a straight line but rather as a circuit, endlessly returning upon itself. Every note seems to insist that what happened has not ended, and that the present remains a magnetic field crossed by ancient currents.

This is not music designed to accompany daily life in the background. It demands attention. Listening to it compels one to sit upright, much as one does when listening to the stories of elders and gradually realising that those stories are also about us.

At a time when jazz often appears divided between nostalgia and mannerism, Irreversible Entanglements choose a third path: one rooted in the continuity of history as it passes through lived experience. And while politically engaged music all too often risks becoming merely an aesthetic of dissent, they remain grounded in something more substantial.

Ground. Friction. Awareness.

This is not an album that offers comfort, nor does it pretend to provide solutions. What it offers instead is a simple truth: when sound is honest, it is always political. And time, when we truly listen to it, never forgives.

Nicola Gaeta

DISTRIBUTED BY

Universal

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