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 London based artist working with sound, scent and performance.
Her mode is improvisational and driven by a desire to explore the feel of things, be it through touch: making and preparing instruments (cello, horsehair harp, psaltery, eggflute, Bluetooth speakers), or emotionally: exploring the way different sounds, scents and gestures feel and produce feeling.
Notable projects include her solo album Promise & Illusion (Otoroku, 2022), Sound perfumes (Aequill, 2022), soundtrack and voiceover for filmmaker Kamila Kuc’s I was there (plus a written passage in accompanying book published 2025, Delere Press), and musical composition for Voyage Through the Diamond Realm (De Beers at Frieze Art Fair, 2025/2026).
Her viral Instagram project Cable Queen is an ongoing spite-piece inspired by the grind of her job working as a sound technician in a male-dominated industry/world, in which she silently coils audio cables whilst looking into the camera. The comments, written by strangers, expose the conditions of her labour.
She has performed and released music with David Toop & Christian Kobi, Valerio Tricoli (as Mordecoli), Andrew Chalk & Tom James Scott (as Circaea), and as a cellist with Vanishing, Thurston Moore and Alexander Tucker. She has performed the works of Pauline Oliveros, Yoko Ono, George Maciunas, Antoine Beuger, Yoni Silver and Taku Sugimoto.
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.
