ARTIST TALK: JACE CLAYTON

Appropriately, given his artist alias – DJ /rupture – Jace Clayton has built his artistic career out of probing at cracks and fissures. He first became known in the early 2000s for DJ mixes like Gold Teeth Thief and Minesweeper Suite, finding unexplored links between dancehall, IDM, rap, international musics, and more, and distributing his mixes via a nascent network of blogs and filesharing sites. He has gone on to become a multimedia artist, author, software designer, and more. What most of his projects – including his astonishing 2016 book Uproot: Travels in 21st-Century Music and Digital Culture – have in common is a shared interest in toppling accepted binaries, critically interrogating technological assumptions, and shining a spotlight on cultural practices that go ignored in mainstream Western discourse. In conversation with music critic Philip Sherburne, Clayton will discuss the wild west of the Y2K internet; his work in promoting the long-forgotten composer Julius Eastman; his current projects for sound and installation; and more.