The Clearing (2021)
Glot / curated by Sophie Rose / Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY/ April 6 - May 26, 2024
JJJJJerome Ellis Selected Works 2021 - 2023/ curated by Inga Charlotte Thiele / Prosopopoeia, Vienna / May 30 - July 28, 2024
What do speech and articulation say about us and our humanity? Who has the power to shape the rules of speech and decide what forms of articulation are considered “standard,” “traditional,” and “acceptable”? Why do these same rulemakers have the power to regulate us?
Recorded in various bedrooms over the course of several months and setting the text of Ellis’s essay to music, The Clearing is a haunting and expansive series of reflections on the questions of speech, articulation, and the power behind both. The album opens with “Loops of Retreat,” a stunning piece that utilizes atmospheric tones with Hip Hop drums and deep bass, connecting those sounds with references ranging from Bernie Mac to W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk. Expanding on Harriet Jacobs’s idea of the “loophole of retreat,” Ellis positions Black music and speech as disruptors of “conventional” time and as tools to map out new means of communication and activity.
Harriet Jacobs reminds us that Black loops in Black music (including but not limited to rap and house) are always Black loop(hole)s of retreat; that Black music, like Black escape, is a never-ending activity and never an achievement. And when the Black stutterer loops a syllable (m-m-m-m-m-mother), this too is a Black loop, Black music, Black activity.
The Clearing is a conceptual and musical tour de force that combines Jazz with the narratives of enslaved Africans, and experimental electronics with historical accounts of Black rebellion. The album centers speech but uses it as a starting point to not only depathologize dysfluent speech but to build new tools to critique anti-Blackness, linear time, culture, and power in our society.
Ellis says of the project: “I hope this album offers the listener some of what my stutter offers me: an opportunity to imagine new ways of being in time.”
The Clearing is co-produced by Northern Spy/NNA Tapes and the Poetry Project. The album will be released in tandem with a book published by Wendy's Subway, the eighth title in the Document Series, an interdisciplinary publishing initiative that highlights work by time-based artists in printed form.
credits
All compositions written, produced, and performed by JJJJJerome Ellis (tenor saxophone, flute, hammered dulcimer, piano, synthesizers, drum and bass programming, electronics, and vocals).
Recorded by JJJJJerome Ellis April 2020 - April 2021 in various bedrooms in Westport, Connecticut; Brooklyn, New York; Ucross, Wyoming; Denver, Colorado; and Lenexa, Kansas.
Mixed by JJJJJerome Ellis and David Rogers-Berry.
Mastered by David Rogers-Berry.
Additional production on "Dysfluent Waters" by David Rogers-Berry.
Album Image by JJJJJerome Ellis and Rissa Hochberger.
Design and Layout by Rissa Hochberger.
Lyrics and vocals by Kelvin Ellis on “Brush Fire Smoke.”
Text and vocals by Milta Vega-Cardona on “Stepney” and “Milta.”
"I am so grateful to: Abed Aladien, Adam Downey, Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves, Ashley Hoffman, Brendan Basham, Caitlin Pasko, Caleb Mulkerin, Casey Llewellyn, Claudia Rankine, Cody DeFalco, Corinne Butta, Courtney Stephens, Dan Schapiro, Daniel Martin, David Rogers-Berry, Dylan Rosenlieb, Emma Alpern, Erica Hunt, Evan Welsh, Gelsey Bell, Howard Fishman, James Harrison Monaco, Jerron Herman, Jessica Almasy, Jim Reynolds, John Ellis, Joshua St. Pierre, Kelvin Ellis, Kristin Dombek, Kyle Dacuyan, Maria Stuart, Montez Press Radio, m. nourbeSe philip, nicHi douglas, Pauline Ellis, Rachel Valinsky, Rissa Hochberger, Saidiya Hartman, Sebastian Zinn, Susan Boynton, Teresa Baker, Tyler Crum, Xavier Danto. To those I have forgotten to thank, forgive me."
From Wendy's Subway:
JJJJJerome Ellis’s The Clearing asks how stuttering, blackness, and music can be practices of refusal against hegemonic governance of time, speech, and encounter. Taking his glottal block stutter as a point of departure, Ellis figures the aporia and the block as clearing to consider how dysfluency, opacity, and refusal can open a new space for relation. Stemming from Ellis's essay "The clearing: Music, dysfluency, Blackness, and time,” published in 2020 in the Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies (Volume 5, Issue 2) the present volume transcribes and translates his investigation across genres and media, turning to the page to ask: How can a book bear the trace of music, and the racialized, disabled body? Can a book be not just a manuscript, but a glottoscript? Ellis opens space for thinking liberation theoretically, historically, and lyrically.
This book is released in tandem with an album co-produced by Northern Spy / NNA Tapes and The Poetry Project.