On The Clearing, composer, producer, multi-instrumentalist and writer JJJJJerome Ellis takes the ideas he first posited in his 2020 essay The Clearing: Music, Dysfluency, Blackness And Time and crafts a remarkable collage of sound, ideas and music. JJJJJerome spells his name like that because he has a stutter, a ‘dysfluency’ that The Clearing explores, celebrates, and connects with a history of Black music and Black experience. Crucially, The Clearing suggests that dysfluency opens up apertures – into new ways of thinking about time and about music – as well as escape routes out of a racist reality for Black dissident artists, musicians and writers. It’s a stunning, compelling piece of work that will reconfigure your ideas about listening, temporality and Black expression.

Neil Kulkarni: If our development of language and speech (as is traditionally seen) breaks the sensory flow of the world into concepts and delineated objects, how does dysfluency impact on those traditional notions of ‘making sense’ of the world?

JJJJJerome Ellis: The first thing that comes to mind, both when I speak dysfluently and when I experience disfluencies from other people (including but not limited to stuttering), is that dysfluency can disrupt normative or conventional mappings of speech onto the world. It can create a kind of blur or porousness in the borders between language and world (and language is part of the world, no?). When I’m stuttering, the world can come rushing into the clearing that’s opened by my dysfluency. Language ‘breaks down’ and in the breaking down there seems to be a return. A return to aspects of the world that are there already. One of the reasons why I like using the metaphor of the clearing is that it’s a part of the natural world (while of course there are also clearings caused by humans, including the wildfires exacerbated by our destructive and extractive practices). Recently I was reading Scottish poet Don Paterson’s The Poem: Lyric, Sign, Metre. He talks about how music existed long before humans (in the water, in the wind, let alone in the animals), and that perhaps human musicians are just tapping into something that is already a part of the natural world. And to me dysfluencies can tap into the music of the world in ways that fluent speech may not be as able to.

What did the sound recording of The Clearing allow you to do that wasn’t possible in purely text?

When I was writing the essay I was interested in the fact that I’m going to be writing about stuttering, but I don’t ’stutter’ when I write. So one of the reasons I was excited to experiment with recording myself reading the essay was to be able to bring the written work, which is so much about orality, back into the oral realm. And that allowed me to pursue a relationship with the ideas in the essay in an embodied way that is different from the modes of embodiment I practiced in writing the essay. And of course the album and book are a document of just one read through of the essay (i.e. if I read through it again, I would likely stutter on different words). Also, recording myself and my stutters allowed me to then begin to treat the stutter as a kind of score: I would record myself first, and then shape the music around the stutters.

A lot of The Clearing is about the reclaiming of things that mainstream society would denote as ‘disabilities’, and recasting them as something powerful and enabling a different perspective. When did your dysfluency become something you thought about in this empowering way?

I think I started to think about it in an empowering way largely through the theatre. Since about 2009 I have been creating works of music theatre with my closest friend in the world, James Harrison Monaco - performance helped me to explore the aesthetic/dramatic/poetic (and political) possibilities of stuttering. Another big step that helped me feel empowered was encountering the writings of Joshua St Pierre, a critical disabilities scholar who stutters. His writing truly changed my life and helped me see my stutter as something other than a pathology. But for most of my life (I’m 32 now), I saw my stutter as something I wanted to get rid of, something that was wrong with me, something that was a burden and curse. The Clearing is partly a celebration of not feeling that way anymore!

When did the connections between dysfluency and Black music first occur to you?

I think it’s only been in the last couple of years that I’ve been able to articulate some of these connections. I grew up listening to a lot of gospel, reggae, calypso, soca (all via my parents), and then later as a teenager, jazz, when I started studying saxophone. I remember noticing, when I started listening to jazz, that my friends who listened to pop punk, I would look at their CD cases and notice that a lot of the songs were around three minutes long. And I noticed that on a lot of my jazz CDs the songs would be seven, eight, nine, twelve, fifteen minutes long. I remember being particularly struck by how few tracks there were on Don Cherry’s Symphony For Improvisers, and how long the tracks were. But I think a lot of the crystallisation on these questions came from reading the scholars Brittney Cooper (especially her TED talk, The Racial Politics Of Time, which the brilliant artist Zhailon Levingston introduced me to), Saidiya Hartman (especially the first chapter of her book Scenes Of Subjection), and Fred Moten (especially his books In The Break and Black And Blur), who all write so incisively about relationships among time, music, and Blackness/Black culture.

In nuts and bolts terms how was The Clearing built? What planning and experimentation did you do until you found the right music for the right words?

It was really fun shaping it. Sometimes I would just record myself reading in silence, and later add music, and go back and forth. And other times I would read over music that I had already been creating in Ableton. And other times I would record myself reading to someone on the phone. I took these different approaches partly because I wanted to invite the stutter into the album, I wanted to stutter. And I know I sometimes stutter more frequently and more fully when speaking to another person (rather than to myself), and I know that I sometimes stutter less frequently and less fully when I speak while listening to music (this is a documented phenomenon called masked auditory feedback; it can be observed in the movie The King’s Speech). Then for the rest of the pandemic summer, I created the other tracks and collaborated with my brother Kelvin Ellis, my sister-in-law Tyler (Crum) Ellis and my mentor Yawo Milta Vega Cardona. For a couple of weeks in summer, multiple nights a week I would put a sequence of tracks on my phone and bike through Brooklyn and Queens in New York City between midnight and 3 am, listening to the sequence draft and observing what I liked and didn’t like. A big influence on the structure was writer Teju Cole’s Known And Strange Things. In that book he uses the structure of a joke in a beautiful way, and I was inspired to structure the album around a joke and punchline. I discovered the shape as I went along.

How did you know when a track was ‘finished’ and what is your relationship to completed work? Do you still listen to The Clearing – can it ever be ‘complete’ or is everything open to revisitation?

Yeah I struggled with this for several tracks. I have a tendency to create very dense, complex musical worlds – my main struggle was sculpting the pieces and trying to remove what felt ‘unnecessary’, which was not always clear. I think I rarely feel that anything I make is done or finished, but with the album I would generally feel that something was done/finished enough when I would listen to it and not cringe lol. But it’s a struggle, and I still actually cringe at some moments, or wish that I could change certain things. I struggle with completion, finalisation, etc. I listen to the album sometimes still (usually just isolated tracks), and still want to change certain things. I don’t really believe in completion in my art. I prefer to see what I make as verbs rather than nouns (to borrow an idea from that Don Paterson book I mentioned), like plants and animals and human beings, constantly growing and evolving. I think the album and the book will continue to evolve, especially as they encounter listeners and readers. Of course they also exist as a recording and a publication, which can seem like finite, closed objects but I prefer to think of them as open situations. In the way that an empty building may be a house but perhaps doesn’t become a home until people live in it. So yes, I feel everything is open to revisitation. And one form of revisitation is through performance. I recently had the opportunity to record two videos of me performing tracks 1 and 8, for WNYC’s New Sounds/Soundcheck. This was the first time I had ever performed the tracks, and that felt really great and felt like the works are continuing to evolve. I look forward to doing more live performances.

The Clearing is released by NNA Tapes 5 November