The most astonishing new talent on the decks is neither spinning 10-hour-long sets at London nightclubs nor waging vinyl warfare against belligerent turntablists at the DMCs, but wonders if there isn’t a more financially sound profession.
“Basically I’m broke,” laughs Jace Clayton ’97, a.k.a. DJ /rupture, “so I’m incredibly picky about buying records.” Thanks to the Internet, though, /rupture has quickly become a household name among fans of bleeding-edge dance music. His bootleg mix album Gold Teeth Thief, which met universal acclaim last year in staple publications such as The Wire and Vibe, has been downloaded by thousands from /rupture’s Soot Records website (www.negrophonic.com). Some consider it one of the best DJ mix albums ever made.
Created on a whim one afternoon, it’s a remarkably versatile work, with moments that are aggressively visceral, irreverent, intensely paranoid and eerily beautiful. Missy Elliott’s familiar “Get Ur Freak On” crashes into violent breakcore shards from DJ Scud and militant boom-bap from Dead Prez early on, yet an hour later the listener is swimming deliriously in the audio experiments of Oval and Muslimgauze. But DJ /rupture’s real brilliance lies not in his eclecticism, an aspiration that Clayton finds “horrifying” for its implications of cultural dabbling. Instead, it’s in how effortlessly he makes sense of these seemingly disparate genres—ranging from dancehall reggae all the way to avant-classical—and recreates them into a singular body that is at once memorable and immensely addictive. Gold Teeth Thief is the sort of boundless organized noise that hasn’t been heard since the heyday of hip-hop and underground rave.
One thing’s for sure—Harvard’s conservative music scene had little to do with it. As a first-year looking for a creative outlet, Clayton was immediately disillusioned by WHRB’s top-down hierarchy and retreated to MIT’s comparatively freeform radio station, WMBR. “I was playing what I loved. It was the total opposite of WHRB, where you have to fit these pre-slotted categories and it’s under their full control,” he says.
When he was a junior, Clayton started an audiovisual collective named Toneburst with like-minded friends from Harvard and the Massachusetts College of Art. Though it has since fallen into abeyance, Toneburst set a precedent for leftfield electronics in Boston’s house and techno-centric club scene. The group hosted DJ and live performances that culminated in a self-produced disc of excursions into hip-hop, jungle and dub.
True to his penchant for change, Clayton was also involved with activism at Harvard, directly targeting the outspoken Kenan Professor of Government Harvey Mansfield ’53 at one point. DJ /rupture’s mixes aren’t overtly political, but they do “make the space for political discussion to happen,” as he puts it.
With three turntables and a mixer, /rupture communicates through layered grooves. An ideal selector who skirts boundaries rather than being confined within them, he builds bridges between musical cultures as only a good DJ can, articulating forgotten connections while suggesting unforeseen ones. Beats from Kingston to Brooklyn engage with seminal musique concrète; rap, ragga and spoken word are given equal voice. As dance music becomes increasingly sanitized, conveniently packaged and endlessly regurgitated for the consumer, DJ /rupture provides a slap in the face, reminding us why this music was important in the first place.
Still, Clayton is no self-righteous preacher. He points out that despite their conceptual depth, his mixes aim to move bodies. “I want to maintain the primal force in the mix,” he says, “to create those moments of rupture, when the ground you’re standing or dancing on sort of falls away.” Far removed from the dreary academicism of the likes of DJ Spooky, /rupture builds upon the sonic foundation laid by Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash, and Afrika Bambaataa. Like those hip-hop pioneers, /rupture creates startling new compositions as a strategy to set things off.
His “official” mix debut, Minesweeper Suite, verges on the epic. Mahmoud Fadl’s Nubian drums ignite the stereo but it’s Donna Summer who graces the final minutes. Impeccably mixed, rhythms mutate fluidly, as opposed to Gold Teeth Thief’s spastic collisions. Sparse French dancehall blossoms into jump-up jungle from DJ Rush Puppy; Bubba’s frantic “Ugly” glides into a head-nodding Akrobatik beat that gets swallowed whole by the industrial grind of /rupture’s Nettle alias; Mutamassik’s shuffling Sa’aidi breakbeats give way to hyperkinetic bhangra.
The album’s title alludes to a search for the explosive in weird combinations of tracks: sounding like they always belonged together, they add up to more than the sum of their parts. Missing Linx’s mundane battle rhymes sound positively apocalyptic over an ominous Mentol Nomad track, while Roberta Flack’s “Killing Me Softly” is like an aural sedative after a string of abrasive breakcore vitriol. When /rupture blends a slowed-down instrumental of Aaliyah’s “Are You That Somebody?” into that song, it’s a small revelation as Flack’s vocal exorcisms and Timbaland’s sonic architecture together evoke a soul that is neither old nor new, but lies in the space between records.
