For moon Over miami, Archival Feedback invited local artists to “hark to the song” and respond to its claims, its form, and make art during the pandemic lockdown of 2020. To hark is to pay close attention, it means remembering while listening. 'mOm' collectively muses over place, memory and language to resist forgetting in the aftertimes.

Miami/Mayaimi is one of the oldest known words we have for the region. As time unfolded, the histories of the place-names that we know were ignored and forgotten; we move through these places and rarely ask their meaning. Miami is named after a people who lived through the European invasion. One of ten words we know in their otherwise forgotten language, it translates to "big water”. “Moon Over Miami” (1935) is a cultural relic of a song, a collective memory with a simultaneous amnesia that persists in its lyrics. Edgar Leslie made a name for himself as a lyricist through a trademark style of "place named songs,” a formulaic way to make a tune memorable. By then Miami had established itself in the imagination of the country as a tropical escape; conjure the moon, and we have the makings of a souvenir in the form of song. Unsurprisingly, Leslie’s lyrics are blissfully ignorant to history or to the realities of ‘35 in Miami, and they give him away as an unreliable narrator.

Revising the traditional lyrics into a poignant moment between past, present, and unknown moment in time, Archival Feedback’s track featuring Rev. Houston R. Cypress, “Moon over Mayaimi” is an inversion of the original, subverting the saccharine lyrics into a call to arms. The Mayaimis are the city’s namesake and this incantation and reverie evokes their memory. Afrobeta’s bruja-synth manifesto “The Answer” is the would-be theme if that reboot of The Craft took place in Miami. The “city under water” thing we’re always referencing is summed up perfectly in the feel of Poorgrrrl’s drowning glitch-scape “Under Miami”. Steph Taylor regales a lo-fi SPF30 pop fantasy in “Open Shores,” while Phaxas spins a standard into rhythmic, sample-laden electro with her “Merry-Go-Round” rework. The spastic, deceptive “Rellena” by Diego Melgar & Tim Watson is at once ominous and familiar as it leads way to AF’s closing “Flamingo Hotel” remix - a granular stereo whirlpool, and the initial inspiration for the mOm project. 

Funds raised from the release will support environmental education in South Florida. Archival Feedback works towards similar intentions. AF is Emile Milgrim and T. Wheeler Castillo. “Moon Over Miami” composed by Joe Burke and lyricist Edgar Leslie, 1935, Revised T. Wheeler Castillo, 2020.