How do our bodies respond to environmental disaster? Evoking beauty and catastrophe, Justen Leroy’s three-channel video Lay Me Down in Praise addresses Black environmentalism through sound and earth. Slow-moving footage of volcanic eruptions, glaciers melting, and turbulent seas meld with a transfixing soundtrack. Inspired by melisma—a vocal technique combining multiple notes in a single word—Leroy carefully wove together references to the Black music traditions of blues, R&B, gospel, and jazz. An artist, filmmaker, and composer, Leroy describes melisma as a kind of disruption “between sounds of Black bodies and unbridled earth, in stillness and crisis, as expressions of freedom, resistance and liberation.” Leroy’s video installation is influenced by personal experiences with disasters that disproportionately impacted Black communities, beginning with Hurricane Katrina in 2005. When levees broke in New Orleans, Louisiana, over a thousand lives were lost, and many people were left stranded without clean water while waiting to be evacuated. He later witnessed the water contamination crises in Flint, Michigan; Compton, California; and Baltimore that again left thousands of people without access to clean water. Here, the artist pays tribute to expressions born from the pain and climate uncertainty these communities endure across time.