Thursday 2 May 2024, 7.30pm
Please note that this show is reschedule from 6th November 2023. All tickets booked for the original date remain valid.
JJJJJerome Ellis is a blk disabled animal, artist, and proud stutterer. He prays, reads, gardens, cycles, surfs, and plays. Through music, literature, performance, and video he researches relationships among blackness, disabled speech, divinity, nature, sound, and time. Born in 1989 to Jamaican and Grenadian immigrants, he lives in Norfolk, Virginia, USA. His diverse body of work includes: contemplative soundscapes using saxophone, flute, dulcimer, electronics, and vocals; scores for plays and podcasts; albums combining spoken word with ambient and jazz textures; theatrical explorations involving live music and storytelling; and music-video-poems that seek to transfigure historical archives. JJJJJerome collaborates with James Harrison Monaco as James & Jerome. Their recent work explores themes of border crossing and translation through music-driven narratives. They have received commissions from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Ars Nova.
In this performance, artist JJJJJerome Ellis presents portions of their latest project Aster of Ceremonies. Using piano, saxophone, electronics, and voice, they’ll perform excerpts from “Benediction,” a devotional song cycle attending to 18th and 19th century Black runaway slaves who stuttered. This performance is an ongoing attempt to, in the words of critic Hortense Spillers, “hear [slavery’s] stutter more clearly.”
JJJJJerome will verbally describe their movements throughout the performance.
Also on the bill, a first-time performance by Clarinda Tse and Ecka Mordecai after a long-time friendship. Sonic-performative diffusion of gathered materials from the Scottish shoreline.
Ecka Mordecai is a British artist based in London. Situated between sonic, performative and olfactory disciplines, her work is driven by sensation: entwining cello, horsehair harp, voice, eggflute, scent and improvisation into time-based objects expressive of emotional complexity.
Both intimate and exacting, this body-driven practice defies formal constraints, undoing the limits of genre and allowing for works such as Aequill Sound, a line of niche perfumes inspired by elements of the East London soundscape, or Promise & Illusion (Otoroku, 2022), the album in which Ecka explores myriad internal states using the compositional device of a creaking door hinge (or charniére).
Performing since 2010, Ecka has appeared alongside the likes of David Toop, Malvern Brume, Thurston Moore, Keeley Forsyth, Ilan Volkov, Ex-Easter Island Head, Greta Buitkute, Dave Birchall and Kate Armitage. She has played at Cafe OTO, BBC Glasgow, Islington Mill and inside a Berlin wasserturm, amongst others.
She has projects with Revox tape performer Valerio Tricoli in the duo Mordecoli (The Addiction, Hedione 2022), and in the trio Circæa with Andrew Chalk and Tom James Scott (The Bridge of Dreams, Faraway Press, 2019).
Clarinda Tse (she/they) is an interdisciplinary performance maker, bodyworker and facilitator, Hong Kong-born and Glasgow-based. Their work explores emergent compositions of material ecologies and bodies as agency for worlding. Their habitat is sensual, slippery, more-than-human, transitional, drawn from everyday experience, multiplicities of selves, play and cellular reconciliation.
