Side A
A1 Hoodoo Children (Skit) [0′ 54″]
A2 Toward a Vernacular Geology [13′ 11″]

Side B
B1 Mudlumps at the Mouth of the Mississippi [4′ 51″]

A1

“The birth of the oceans is a matter of conjecture, the subsequent history is obscure, and the present structure is just beginning to be understood. Fascinating speculation on these subjects has been plentiful, but not much of it predating the last decade holds water. Little of Umbgrove’s (1947) brilliant summary (The pulse of the earth) remains pertinent when confronted by the relatively small but crucial amount of factual information collected in the intervening years. Like Umbgrove, I shall consider this paper an essay in geopoetry. In order not to travel any further into the realm of fantasy than is absolutely necessary I shall hold as closely as possible to a uniformitarian approach; even so, at least one great catastrophe will be required early in the Earth’s history.” —Henry Hess, “History of Ocean Basins,” 1962

“If we are constrained to study an overwriting of geology that was meant to compensate for an already failed cosmology—a way of centering Europe in or on Earth’s eccentric and decentering mass; a violent reduction offered to save the phenomenon of world—it is not only because we are poor in the world but because that poverty is given in and as the incalculable wealth and rhythm of the down and out, which is not only our condition but also our (dis)orientation, our topological imperative to preserve social space in its constant differentiation and dislocation. This ain’t about resiliency; this is about regeneration.” —Fred Moten, “Black Topological Existence,” 2018

“I thought that a lot of the demos felt and sounded better to me that I had done in the crib on a four-track. We had to reproduce that in the studio. I felt like it was overproduced “ —D’Angelo, 2015

“It was also to take outside sounds like screams and hollows and create some kind of musical texture with them and to create a design with it and that was what we were after in the whole piece.” —Max Roach, 1984

“WHEREAS SCIENCE, MATHEMATICS, PHYSICS ARE THE TRUE WORD OF GOD AS THEY CANNOT LIE OR DISTORT…” —Mike Banks, 2022

A2

How have geological processes informed non-western cultural logics? If liberation is a spatial practice, one can (and many have) look(ed) to the Earth as the prime blueprint to find footing on increasingly shifting ground. Here, I am engaging in a practice of Black Study, putting the scientific perspectives of Earth sciences into conversation with the discipline of Black Studies. Reading Black Study as environmental thought teases out the ontological kinship between the Earth and ourselves, woodshedding the mutual use of discursive self-organizing tactics that we need to navigate colonial structures. Quarries made of labor and mineral. (Black heat magma in the juke joint spreading lava once it’s out the hot house.) As history tends to preserve western mythologies, this essay gestures at weaving an epistemology that geologizes blackness to work through the global involvement that blackness presupposes (in scale and protocol) inside its own existence. These are unfinished notes, imposing a creole sensibility on a tempered timescale (science). 

With respect to Earth and time, there is a western impulse to attribute linearity to temporal experiences at a scale that we can understand (or feel a sense of control over). This impulse has left many confused with their relation to the Earth as an interscalar vehicle that moves at different rhythms, from short-term seasonal or annual cycles all the way to certain climate cycles with periodicities of up to 400,000 years. The axial tilt of the Earth that ultimately influences seasonality wobbles about every 41,000 years. How do we make sense of that when we’ve been driven to solely make sense of a time that is essentially microscopic (let the beat build)? 

Geology and its scientific kindred, birthed from the cradle of the Age of the Reason (1685–1815), quickly became a tool to delineate between the Man and its other. This period of enlightenment was quickly routed into psychological projection—a false beam shone onto various land masses to measure and subordinate through organizational hierarchy.

The geological rock cycle carries the topological conceits of intertwined circles, with no clear beginning or end. (This alone always/already begins to resonate with cultures whose cosmologies engage in generative systems—cultures who model nature seem disinterested in working towards absolute extraction.) For the sake of communicating through geometric-geological heuristics, we will determine a beginning and ending (or lack thereof) via the mathematical definition of origin, “a convenient point of reference” (Higuchi and Martin, 2005, 3). Collapsing the linear approach to history (and blackness by extension), presents no starting point—where one begins is never objective. 

For this writing, the “origin point” in the Black rock cycle will be Africa, a metaphorical orogeny (a process of mountain building that creates evidence of creation; we have more in common with rocks than we’d like to admit; rocks are a mundane series of proofs, windowview of a natural cosmology; rocks are time out of joint; demotape cuttings on Earth’s floor). The orogeny has a dual geological purpose of generating lithification (rock production) through the compression of converging plate boundaries resulting in the construction of continents (Wegener, 1929). Via erosion events led by water and wind, rock formations from orogenous events are slowly broken down into lithic fragments and travel through various currents away from their initial point of deposition (Reuseer et al., 1998). It is here where said fragments undergo a process known as diagenesis: changes in sedimentary deposits during burial and before metamorphosis (a complete melting episode that concludes the current form of the lithic fragment) (Blatt et al., 1996). 

In mixing this deep time protocol with a brief social history of the African diaspora, enslaved Africans were made “negro” (as mountain erodes to sediment, only to re/member at an elsewhere coastline) thus forced into existence as handicraft, an extensional tool of the West to iterate the continued falsehood of nature as territory. Through such a lens, enslaved Blacks were an early modern form of technology, “the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes, especially in industry” (Wu et al., 2020). Western science, and the methodologies that inform it, have been deemed the singular (or most valued) knowledge system in the world, decimating other intelligences and languages in its wake to place itself at the top of its own constructed hegemony, with what Wynter termed “…the Coloniality of Being / Power / Truth / Freedom” (2003) Black study attempts to unsettle this disparity. These hegemonic gestures (such as practices of enslavement and resource extraction) continue to be justified through the collective ontological annihilation otherwise known as late era capitalism (how late is the clock past midnight?), carceral statehood, and environmental collapse.

The duality of these two manufactured realities (nature and man) is made legible in the context of western expansion, as these two realities underwent the same colonial pressures, at the same time, under the same processes, and toward the same ends. Thus lies an ontological kinship between salt, soil, and Black people. Each and all holding in the hold beside one another.

With the relational processes I alluded to earlier, erosion, deposition, and diagenesis, are mainly understood through what the Earth “does.” We can look at what Kyra D. Gaunt terms our own “somatic historiography” as a geology unto itself (a structural and substantive phenomenon of activity on and of this planet).  Similar acts have been historically impressed upon both the land and the people through different magnitudes and vectors. Erosion is the breakdown of movement of source rock, creating lithic fragments. Unlike weathering, erosion inherently includes movement (Reusser et al., 2015). Deposition is the later settling of said lithic fragments. Over time, this depositional layer gets buried by newer, subsequent material, usually of the same material unless different source rock or chemistry was added into the parameters of the system. This is not a complete melting-recrystallization episode like metamorphism, but the land undergoes enough change to necessitate a new classification, while at the same time still resembling its source material from an elemental standpoint (Blatt et al., 1996). 

Ryan C. Clarke, Soul cycle (Every Nigger Is A Staurolite), 2026.

Paralleling this cycle with a self<—>made Black object<—>self-made subject paradigm that Black history has travelled, the steps are eerily similar: we can understand erosion in a sociocultural sense as the inciting event producing diaspora and the Black “source rock,” Africa. These lithic fragments made disparate sediment particles across cultures to settle at shore’s edge (e.g., the American South). Continuous deposition leads to burial under pressure where changes reconstitute the fragments into something altered (diagenesis / production of blackness / negrolithification). From there, the surviving spirit of blackness gets reestablished into various forms of fugitivity, and it is such fugitivity that allows these negroliths to travel back up through the rock record (space-time) to anachronize itself (resuspension of sediment/mud diapirs through sediment loading/sankofic geologies) as sediment in and on the Earth.

West African symbology begets other histories of abstraction through engaging in a sociocultural modeling system that responds to nature’s patterns through storytelling devices, most notably with Adinkra symbols. Adinkra act as geomancy/divination/proverbial tools toward developing insight into values and lessons in the ecological, geographical, and geological. Earth, as a pedagogical system, reflects the generation of one’s own culture. Many of the symbols express this relationship through the visualization of logarithmic scaling, recursion, iteration, and repetition. In comparison to what systems prop up western human existence, the Earth holds a radical politik. What might patterns rooted in self-organized generation sound like? High gods. Understanding blackness as Earth sciences inscribes a collective sensibility centering not just life but the methods to replenish it. Anticolonial in its disinterest in extractionary methods. Not to prioritize obedience for its own sake but to entangle one’s own epistemology with devotion toward livelihood before subjecthood.

Ron Eglash, “African fractals: Modern computing and Indigenous design,” 1999.

The relation can be seen most clearly through heritage algorithms, or “the computational thinking inherent to the cultural artifacts and practices of Indigenous and vernacular artisans” (Eglash, 2019.) In African cultures, mathematics moves inside weaving, architecture, cooking, and crafting as a social expression and not an academic practice. It becomes a view of the internal and external landscape of a community. Patterns of life that presuppose involvement and relation. (What’s seen combined with what’s believed in.) In the US South, multiple African and non-western Indigenous communities all find themselves imagining inside cities and fields bounded by another kind of mathematics—one of repetition, assembly, and iteration toward extraction and not upward mobility. In this mutual bind of colonial imposition, there lies a kinship inside how Black, Brown and Red people determine time. Music is but one vehicle that emerges from this cultural impulse. And it’s this entanglement of impulse with the social reality of Black subjects that over time we have no choice but to inject what we feel into the sound itself.

The traditional protocol of the creole asks us to recontextualize the various intelligence systems and tools we hold (immaterial reinvention). Or, to recontextualize toward a re-practicing. If Black music is understood to be a series of fugitive gesticular rituals (I’m playing, but nothing’s funny) from the impressive to the mundane, the delta plain landscape presents an abundance of adaptive navigations through a colonial stageplay known as development. The same appetite for extraction of resources, fertile soil from dried of continential interior seaway watered the mouth of planets; Earth as delectable negro. Deltaic thinking regards the landscape and its crossfading wetland as an antecedent architectural insight toward a southern negritude then communicated across varying forms and media. This topological framing of thought is a sort of Deluzian third rail between the rigid branches of arborescent thinking and the seemingly flat non-hegemony of the rhizome. Using Southern Louisiana deltaic lobe history as an exemplary (but not authoritative) image to visualize the structure of Black music through time, the delta form provides a sense of a networked (interdependent, rhizomatic), yet dendritic (arborescent) form.

The maps below show how southern Louisiana was created through a nonlinear, errantly spatial mixing of various delta lobes growing and expanding on top of and beside each other. As the Mississippi Delta constructed southern Louisiana spatially and geographically, so too did it shape 19th/20th-century Black music—an intermixed progression-procession of sorrow songs begetting gospel begetting blues begetting jazz begetting R&B begetting rock begetting house begetting techno and rap, all producing their own discrete but interconnected lobes, expanding and stacking beside. This referential resuspension of spirit made unconsolidated in an ongoing process of reconstitution through what’s outside is a predominantte Black syntax that rhymes nicely with the syntax of riparian systems.

(River as meandering second line. Drum as accretion phenomenon. Delta as contraption drum kit. Polyrhythmic means of reckoning with time and space. The delta and I are both kids on the run. Levees prison pipeline field hollers crevasse splaying unsignifiable geology revolt break.) 

Harry H. Roberts, “Dynamic changes of the Holocene Mississippi River delta plain: The delta cycle,” Oceanographic Literature Review, 1997.

A Black musical history excerpt imposed on a deltaic structural history of Black music to give equal weight of how music is a spatial practice as much as it is a temporal one (from Clarke, 2024).

The Caribbean was a hot spot for the colonial experimentation of modernity and the clarifying of which people were worthy of determinacy, and it still is. In the American system, one can look at the degradation of the Black shoals of the Gulf once again to bear witness to the effects of depraved mining experiments on various demographics. 

B1

James P. Morgan, “Mudlumps at the mouths of the Mississippi River,” Coastal Engineering Proceedings, no. 2, 1951.

(From a conversation with Cauleen Smith, Dec. 16, 2024.)

We’re thinking through this geological idea called mud lumps or mud volcanoes or mud springs. What happens is, as the delta progrades out, you can imagine the heaviest bits of sediment will fall really quickly, where the really fine ones will go and start to fall very slowly and much further away from the mouth of the river.

As the delta grows, those really heavy ones start to pile up on the very light sediment that a much older Mississippi deposited. Over time, during diagenesis, as this starts to stack up on top of each other, that really light sediment pressed on by the heavier mud will be squeezed up and out into the marsh platform back up on the surface.

Back in the ’50s, so many geologists were like, “What the hell is going on? Why is there this older mud right on top of younger material?” This is in the middle of the Mississippi River, by the way.

This is not a shoreline, and so boaters would see how these geological formations that were not there the night before would suddenly rise and disrupt sea channels. These things emerge so fast, and so these boats would just get stalled on top of what was previously understood as an open body of water. 

I love this idea of anachronism happening inside the Earth as well, which made me think about the circulation that’s happening with African music where blues music is not just in reference to the secular, but the sacred, which accommodates space for something named Soul, which reverts forward to jazz, which refers back to blues.

Finding non-organic methodologies that resemble how blackness behaves under pressure feels important and worth telling others. How other things not labelled “Man” or “Human” reassert itselves and disturb ideas of linearity.

Black art should be considered a porous maritime geoglyph construction insofar as dealing with blackness deals with relating to an earthen shadowcast of an ongoing event. An ongoing fracture / decay / dislocation. Erosion is this unfathomable event that can be understood as violent, really strong, and energetic, but what’s left in wake is void and vacancy. Applying the geological model to the protocol of history and culture as it elucidates the possibility to “reconstruct continuities out of rupture itself” (Armstrong). A notion toward a progressive geology or geopoetics lyricizes the constant flux of displacement, which is both undermining and reassuring.

When we consider voidness as accommodated space that wants nothing to do with static understandings of taking up space, we can think about the lack of object(ification) as refusal to be refused (à la Nathaniel Mackey.) What causes emptiness? What are the politics of emptiness? 

At its core, the Black tradition is the recurring discovery that the only way to produce infinity (something out of nothing) is geometrically. That is to say, to acknowledge the “spatial relationships among various objects.” (Kelso, 2001) A mind-body deal. This cultural phenomenon holds its truth through the work, the play, and the spirituality we relate with its culture. Self-organization is key. Meaning, “the spontaneous formation of pattern and pattern change in complex systems whose elements adapt to the very patterns of behavior they create.” or “a process where some form of overall order arises from local interactions between parts of an initially disordered system.

                              Jes grew over in Meridian,

20 minutes past Woodville

                              Clark Creek and Red Bluffs were my waterfall,

Spirit levels rising Natchez rhythm club fire

                              Mississippi is our fourth wall,
listening to the fifth for another earth

The river is an indeterminate song of protest.

Ryan C. Clarke is a tonal geologist from the southeastern banks of the Mississippi. His work in the field of expanded earth science is informed by his experience as a sedimentologist and ethnomusicologist that proposes counter-architectures of sociality based on the deltaic processes that built the land his home resides on. His writings and lectures have been published by e-flux, Rhizome, Triple Canopy, Terraforma, Harvard University, Warp Records, and Dweller Electronics, where he is a co-editor and curator.