free download: signor benedick the moor is back with his hyper-ambitious ‘maiden voyage’ #soundcheck

Say what you will, but you can never say Signor Benedick the Moor isn’t ambitious as all fuck. After a 2015 that saw him releasing the rap opera “Opus III” and a garage mixtape, SB the Moor is back with the 12-minute epic “Maiden Voyage” b/w “1200am.” With Nina Simone samples exhorting black power and genre-demolishing music, Signor Benedick offers an opening salvo for 2016.

By Nathan Leigh, AFROPUNK Contributor

“Maiden Voyage” is the most elaborate “fuck you assholes, I’m out of here” ever committed to tape. Signor Benedick fantasizes about captaining an air-ship away from everything from oppression, racism, GMO food, the music industry, and false friends to a land where “you can live and be black until the day you die.” It’s epic in scope, switching from trap to industrial before a classical-inflected guitar line leads into a post-punk bridge. Nina Simone anchors the track with her iconic interview, cutting in and out of the swooping piano and shifting beats.

“I think what you’re trying to ask is why am I so insistent upon… giving out to them that BLACK-ness, that BLACK-power, that BLACK pushing them to identify with black culture; I think that’s what you’re asking. I have no choice over it; in the first place, to me we are the most beautiful creatures in the whole world, black people. And I mean that in every sense, outside and inside. And to me we have a culture that is surpassed by no other civilization but we don’t know anything about it. So again, I think I’ve said this before in this same interview, I think at some time before. My job is to somehow make them curious enough or persuade them, by hook or crook, to get more aware of themselves and where they came from and what they are into and what is already there, and just to bring it out. This is what compels me to compel them and I will do it by whatever means necessary.” – Nina Simone

On the b-side, Signor Benedick brings in his compatriots from clipping. for a track that defies the sprawling ambition of his usual style for a tight (comparatively) focused cut that’s no less ambitious. “1200am” demands that you step out of the Matrix and take stock of the reality around you; the life and death and the systems that oppress. If “Maiden Voyage” is an optimistic fantasy about leaving all the shit behind, “1200am” plays as a wake-up call. There is no fantasy. There is no flying away on an air-ship. There is only engaging with the present and fixing the broken shit and doing what you can to stay alive and sane.

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