Purple Moonlight Pages

There’s a moment about halfway through Purple Moonlight Pages where Rory Ferreira—the Maine-via-Chicago rapper formerly known as Milo—recounts sitting on the toilet at a gas station and reading a dialogue between two previous visitors, the first of whom wants to know the purpose of life, the second of whom answers, “To be the eyes, the ears and consciousness of the creator of the universe. You fool!” at which point Ferreira cracks up laughing. For the trainspotters, it’s a Kurt Vonnegut quote, but its function in Ferreira’s vision of the universe is clear: To those with eyes open, wonder can be found anywhere, from the grand peaks of art (“Leaving Hell”) to the routine of household chores (“Laundry”). If anything, Ferreira seems to set forth from the notion that such distinctions—between the grand and the modest, the exceptional and the everyday—aren’t as useful as we might think. As with his Milo projects, Ferreira’s grace is that for all his galaxy-brain tendencies, he always ends up coming off as a funny, grounded dude with more respect for the world outside his head than the one in it—at one point, he raps that he’d rather be trained as an electrician than get famous. The production—by the trio of Kenny Segal, Aaron Carmack, and Mike Parvizi—is just as inspired, zigzagging with the jazzy circuity of thought.