It’s hard to define someone when their work is so complex that it intersects geology and earth sciences, music, and academic research. So what better way than talking to him directly? Ryan C. Clarke is a tonal geologist, expanding and explaining the meeting points between place and sound. “They both require the context of the other, so we might be doing a disservice to both place and sound by conceptually compartmentalising them,” he tells us in this interviews.
But besides all of this, he’s curated Living Equipment, a series of events taking place in New York City, organised by the Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought and Triple Canopy, that hosts a wide array of talent to discuss music, film, history, identity, and more. We took a few minutes from Ryan’s packed schedule to discuss all of this and get a better understanding.
Hey Ryan, it’s a pleasure to speak with you. How are you feeling today, and where do you answer us from?
Hi Arnau, it’s a pleasure to join you in conversation. Being in New York for the longest stint in my life is bringing feelings of alienation, but the moments I get to share and be around those that care for me are becoming that much more valued. Reflecting on how much this feeling could resonate with diasporic anxieties of being or becoming away from home. Many thoughts, but generally in gratitude.
I read that you’re a tonal geologist, but I’m not really sure I fully grasp what that entails. Could you please clarify it for us?
It's a compound term addressing my plural attention towards the study of the earth as much as the social history of sound. Its colloquial roots are from this paragraph in the Oct. 1995 issue of Raygun magazine where Brian Eno considers the musical role pianist Mike Garson plays as being the “‘tonal geology of the music — the harmonic underpinning from which everything else grows.” That phrase really interested me, so I decided to take that notion on its most formal terms through writing from an interdisciplinary perspective and gathering degrees in both Earth Sciences and Musicology to build an interwoven vocabulary that considers a region’s cultural “harmonic underpinning” being Earth’s developmental protocols on which the culture performs upon. Creolisation that culturally metabolises the above and below ground equally.
Could you give me an example of that?
An early example for me was the way in which New Orleans culture behaves in a deltaic manner. One of congregation, aggregation, deposition, meandering, and flooding within colonial structures. I wanted to include my scientific practice into the sort of extrasensory perception that is clearly required in Black culture as both an aesthetic and survival mechanism.
The term ‘field songs’ (or ‘field holler’ or ‘levee work song’) is very much a guiding thought for me. Generally understood as a phenomena many enslaved Africans took part in while working against their will. This phrase gives equal weight to ground and outcry. In that way you leave a linear understanding of what’s happening and a spatial sense arrives. Was the levee sorrow songing alongside Black folk? Were both ready to burst? Was the song sung to or by the field? How was the field also responding to colonial implications? Where does the call and response between the two begin? Do we abandon the linear conception of a beginning and Blackness prompts the refusal of origin?
The American South continues to be seen as a site of exploitation and conquest much like the Black people stripped of their humanity in and after the transatlantic slave trade. By that notion, we have much more in common with the field than with those who lay false claim upon it and us. I am interested in investigating that ontological resonance quantitatively and qualitatively.
The term ‘field songs’ (or ‘field holler’ or ‘levee work song’) is very much a guiding thought for me. Generally understood as a phenomena many enslaved Africans took part in while working against their will. This phrase gives equal weight to ground and outcry. In that way you leave a linear understanding of what’s happening and a spatial sense arrives. Was the levee sorrow songing alongside Black folk? Were both ready to burst? Was the song sung to or by the field? How was the field also responding to colonial implications? Where does the call and response between the two begin? Do we abandon the linear conception of a beginning and Blackness prompts the refusal of origin?
The American South continues to be seen as a site of exploitation and conquest much like the Black people stripped of their humanity in and after the transatlantic slave trade. By that notion, we have much more in common with the field than with those who lay false claim upon it and us. I am interested in investigating that ontological resonance quantitatively and qualitatively.
Bridging science and the arts is nothing new, but it is atypical nonetheless. So how did that interest to find the intersecting points between the two spark?
Being from southern Louisiana, I always recognised how there’s an opacity between practice and play. In high school, my capstone project was animating a short film about building awareness for the state’s ongoing issue of catastrophic land loss due to a number of factors: oil extraction, sea level rise, and a lack of land replenishment due to leveeing most of the Mississippi River — the region’s predominate source of soil. From there, I spent over a decade in Geological Sciences and I wanted to find a more fulfilling output of broadcasting these concerns beyond writing papers and praying for tenure.
Moving to New Orleans about a decade ago helped me recognise how important it is to meet people where they are. And in that town, we are where the music is. I always loved music since before I had the language to understand that, so it's only recently that I’ve let go of intellectually compartmentalising those fields for myself. The city only affirmed this choice for me. I might also consider listening to jazz and DJing techno as having rewired my brain. I’d like to believe I’m writing essays with the same protocol as a selector chooses records or a jazz band producing a singular assemblage of sound through disparate elements.
Moving to New Orleans about a decade ago helped me recognise how important it is to meet people where they are. And in that town, we are where the music is. I always loved music since before I had the language to understand that, so it's only recently that I’ve let go of intellectually compartmentalising those fields for myself. The city only affirmed this choice for me. I might also consider listening to jazz and DJing techno as having rewired my brain. I’d like to believe I’m writing essays with the same protocol as a selector chooses records or a jazz band producing a singular assemblage of sound through disparate elements.
You’re curating the series Living Equipment, a programme of conversations, listening sessions, and performances presented with the Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought. How did that project land on you? What attracted you about it?
Initially, I did a drop-in DJ set lecture-reading performance with Triple Canopy during my time in New York in Feb 2023 while co-running a Black techno festival in Brooklyn called Dweller Electronics. The event was called ‘DJing as Publishing’ that hoped to present an expanded form of publishing through considering DJing as a sort of aural zine or researched essay with curated rhythms as quotes that then produced personal self-expression by creating a third song between two alongside spoken text readings. I think they dug it so we kept in touch and over the course of the last year we produced this series.
Rivers comes into the picture out of sheer relation, friendship, and proximity. Rivers as a group are attracting certain pockets of thinkers and artists in New Orleans and in the South in general. Them and Triple Canopy go way back, so when building this programming it was a no brainer to have them along for developing certain concepts as well as helping make explicit the relationship I have between the two cities. After this month in NYC, we’ll be doing more events in New Orleans within the social context that city provides. Shotgun home and neighbourhood bar convening instead of hi-fi listening rooms and Lower East lofts. Wouldn’t have it any other way.
Rivers comes into the picture out of sheer relation, friendship, and proximity. Rivers as a group are attracting certain pockets of thinkers and artists in New Orleans and in the South in general. Them and Triple Canopy go way back, so when building this programming it was a no brainer to have them along for developing certain concepts as well as helping make explicit the relationship I have between the two cities. After this month in NYC, we’ll be doing more events in New Orleans within the social context that city provides. Shotgun home and neighbourhood bar convening instead of hi-fi listening rooms and Lower East lofts. Wouldn’t have it any other way.
As a curator, you have the power to highlight stories, voices, and people that you believe are important in today’s cultural conversation. How did you go about this process of handpicking the acts?
Again, it's an ongoing iteration and repetition of the relationships I hold either imagined or material. The events we’re generally built with those on the lineup we have. For Deltaic Listening, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts more or less ignited that sort of Black flaneur energy in me while reading Harlem Is Nowhere during my Musicology program. How to see space and life as something as informative and textured as an archive.
For Fractal Rip, after following Black Quantum Futurism, I knew getting Rasheedah Phillips was a no brainer as they too problematise the mythcraft that various Western knowledge systems are implicated in creating a false sense of objectivity to subjugate the world. It's also timed with their new book, Dismantling the Master’s Clock, so I wanted to use the opportunity to think our own positions through together.
For The Right Address, Sweater on Polo is a purveyor of certain Black electronic sound that might be beginning to be understood as a folk art now, so how do we socially organise around a morphing understanding of a congregating force like house and techno? Frankie Decaiza Hutchinson is one of my co-conspirators with Dweller, and I felt it important to consider that question in public as we continuously do privately. We also acted on this with a party at Bossa Nova Civic Club right after. The DJ booth was a lectern for an hour or so.
For Fractal Rip, after following Black Quantum Futurism, I knew getting Rasheedah Phillips was a no brainer as they too problematise the mythcraft that various Western knowledge systems are implicated in creating a false sense of objectivity to subjugate the world. It's also timed with their new book, Dismantling the Master’s Clock, so I wanted to use the opportunity to think our own positions through together.
For The Right Address, Sweater on Polo is a purveyor of certain Black electronic sound that might be beginning to be understood as a folk art now, so how do we socially organise around a morphing understanding of a congregating force like house and techno? Frankie Decaiza Hutchinson is one of my co-conspirators with Dweller, and I felt it important to consider that question in public as we continuously do privately. We also acted on this with a party at Bossa Nova Civic Club right after. The DJ booth was a lectern for an hour or so.
“I’d like to believe I’m writing essays with the same protocol as a selector chooses records or a jazz band producing a singular assemblage of sound through disparate elements.”
Sounds incredible!
For A Common Wind, I looped in a friend whose practice I respect, Ashley Teamer. By engaging with a visual artist who works in assemblage and collage, I hope to consider other forms of expression that intend to disrupt a sort of Western linear syntax of understanding. I wonder how resonant those positions and experience might be with techno as another sort of reassemblage in the wake of catastrophe. Do the repetitions within the sound behave as a sort of quiltwork?
For Circulatory Systems, it's really an extension on ‘DJing as Publishing’ but engaging more with the choreography of choice with filmmaker Ephraim Aisli. We’re both interested in Black art presents another way to go about choice. How certain syncopation might be found in an editing bay with his film The Inheritance the same way they might be found making a beat on a Roland SP-404.
And lastly, No-Reentry dives into the esoteric with two DJs and scholar I know and have worked with, Yulan Grant and Jesús Hilario-Reyes, where we hope to discuss the topics of wordless transfer African derived might be trying to convey to ourselves and the audience at the club. What silent sermons might be woven in the sound and rhythm.
For Circulatory Systems, it's really an extension on ‘DJing as Publishing’ but engaging more with the choreography of choice with filmmaker Ephraim Aisli. We’re both interested in Black art presents another way to go about choice. How certain syncopation might be found in an editing bay with his film The Inheritance the same way they might be found making a beat on a Roland SP-404.
And lastly, No-Reentry dives into the esoteric with two DJs and scholar I know and have worked with, Yulan Grant and Jesús Hilario-Reyes, where we hope to discuss the topics of wordless transfer African derived might be trying to convey to ourselves and the audience at the club. What silent sermons might be woven in the sound and rhythm.
In the press release, it says that “Living Equipment will trace the migrations and mutations of Black music, emphasising the role of geography in forming and circulating the cultural traditions that birthed techno and house.” As someone who’s extensively researched about it, what relationship do you draw between place and sound?
A sense of oneness and mutual tending to. They both require the context of the other, so we might be doing a disservice to both place and sound by conceptually compartmentalising them.
Many music genres come from Black artists and tradition, even if they’ve been whitewashed throughout the years. What would you say is the biggest misconception or lie that we’ve been told about some genres or type of music?
The largest misconception around Black music is that they’re discrete elements of genre at all. Genre tends to embalm a sound by disconnecting a certain repository of music away from the moment and place it emerged from. If we understand techno as having happened, then maybe we might begin to consider that what's happening is what’s always been — people getting together around the sound of now that mutually resonates between them. That when you put a name on it in that way, you place an expiration on it.
Black music is groove, any more is spatial and temporal discernment. A friend yesterday told me that what we call techno today isn’t really techno anymore because we’re not in 1980 anymore. I’m still sitting with that. Nomenclature helps to communicate, but through an industrial lens, its stifled progress and vision. Unfortunately, we must live with the tongues we have.
Black music is groove, any more is spatial and temporal discernment. A friend yesterday told me that what we call techno today isn’t really techno anymore because we’re not in 1980 anymore. I’m still sitting with that. Nomenclature helps to communicate, but through an industrial lens, its stifled progress and vision. Unfortunately, we must live with the tongues we have.
Beyoncé is one of those artists reclaiming Black ownership when it comes to different genres like house (Renaissance – act i), country (Cowboy Carter – act ii), and is rumoured to be working on a third act focused on rock. How important is it that influential, mainstream artists like her put the focus on topics like that?
I don’t think it's important at all. Some people might arrive to a deeper sensibility of their history, which is impactful in a sense, but we’re downstream of a deeper issue if Beyoncé is the first one to tell you country is your sound too. The mainstream is geared towards commodification at scales of infinite growth, so the focus should be on using that musical information towards generative sustainability of the music and its culture rather than the aesthetics of it like a fitting room before putting on a new costume.
Here, I’ll quote ‘Mad’ Mike Banks of Underground Resistance, where he considers his techno to be “engineer[ing] the sound of a rumour.” That approach is much capable of fundamental recontextualisation through its subversion. As Caribbean theorist Sylvia Wynter puts it, “drums are an instrument of consciousness reversal.” That is the sort of influence I’m interested in.
Here, I’ll quote ‘Mad’ Mike Banks of Underground Resistance, where he considers his techno to be “engineer[ing] the sound of a rumour.” That approach is much capable of fundamental recontextualisation through its subversion. As Caribbean theorist Sylvia Wynter puts it, “drums are an instrument of consciousness reversal.” That is the sort of influence I’m interested in.
The series of events started last weekend. How have you perceived the audience’s response to it?
Engaging and not stuffy. I’m mostly thankful that they end up feeling like a house party that became mutually inquisitive rather than a cold room seminar.
Has it been good, fruitful, entertaining, were they surprised to discover certain things…?
We’ve been including lots of listening between the conversations and I’m getting a lot of feedback saying how they don’t want to go to another talk between people without moments of music in between! And the music says so much more in a few minutes than we could ever really say. Discovering how sounds needs to be present in the room rather than only be talked about.
You wear many hats: writer, researcher, curator, student… How do you juggle all that in your daily life?
Your guess is as good as mine. I work as a lab manager for a marine science department in Mississippi for my day job, so I think any resonances that might relate to this music work, I tuck away in my notes during working hours and flesh it out at night back home. Lots of pondering on my porch.
To finish, in these turbulent times in the US, what do you hope your work can contribute to in the betterment of American society and culture?
I hope the work continues the tradition that Black electronics have iterated on. To keep experimenting on methodologies of coming together. That Black music is a depositional history of people self-defining their lives through self-determination, self-possession, and self-actualisation. The great thing about this music is that it holds a historical framework to materialise those collective desires that we can build on everyday.
New Orleans has taught me the benefits of speaking out loud and not being afraid to get out in the streets together. We will surely have to increase our capacity for exercising those gestures. I hope music continues to behave as prophecy.
New Orleans has taught me the benefits of speaking out loud and not being afraid to get out in the streets together. We will surely have to increase our capacity for exercising those gestures. I hope music continues to behave as prophecy.
