Flesh of Fruit make experiential experimental compositions. The duo of local sound artists Allen Moore and Hunter Diamond have been creating sounds together for the past five years. Diamond, a multi-instrumentalist who centers his work on the saxophone, plays in improvisational settings and more traditionally structured ensembles, including jazz quartet Black Diamond (which he leads with saxophonist Artie Black) and Ethiopian-inspired psychedelic funk group Radio Outernational. He also collaborates with artists working in various disciplines across the city’s diverse creative landscape, including dancer Irene Hsiao (also a Reader contributor) and performance poet and author Marvin Tate. Moore is an accomplished visual artist as well as a musician. He uses graphite in many of his paintings and sculptures, and he eventually began casting records out of the mineral by hand. Those platters create a ghostly sound under a turntable needle, which provides the foundation for the sound-art compositions on Flesh of Fruit’s brand-new self-titled debut album.
Much of Moore’s work explores signifiers of the Black experience. His recent sound- and visual-art exhibition at Elastic, “Sunday Mourning” (which closed at the end of February), was an investigation of Black death and Black grief. Flesh of Fruit continues this thematic exploration of Black identity through sounds that evoke the Black diaspora. A blast of Diamond’s saxophone on “Frontiersmen” sounds like a train-station announcement, while Moore’s records shuffle in with the clicking of heels; the platform fills up with percussive and spectral sounds, and the train takes off toward unknown destinations. This passage brings to mind the hardships of the Great Migration, as each pop and crackle of the record feels like a bump on the southern roads leading north and west. Flesh of Fruit uses woodwinds and graphite to conjure Afrofuturistic visions that aspire to a better world.
Flesh of Fruit Sharon Udoh & Cristal Sabbagh open. Fri 3/21, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 3111 N. Western, $20, 18+
