Uproot

We Say...

Review by Michaelangelo Matos

The thing that’s easy to miss about Jace Clayton — Boston native, Madrid long-timer, current Brooklynite — is how fine an ear he has for the purely beautiful. Granted, he’s got so many other things going on — whether in one of his sterling mixes as DJ /rupture, the fine records he makes as /rupture and Nettle or the sharp critical pieces he writes both for Frieze and his smart blog Mudd Up!— that you’d be forgiven for not thinking of his penchant for aural honey right away. But so much of Uproot, the first “official” (as in licensed and generally available) mix-CD /rupture has made since 2002’s Minesweeper Suite, catches you short not for how hard it moves but for how lovely it sounds just laying there.

Of course, no DJ /rupture mix just lies there. Uproot opens with Baby Kites and Nokea’s “Reef,” which begins with a slow, faint flute line that seems to display itself from front to back before a dubstep beat swerves in; the next dozen tracks change the rhythmic tics but maintain a powerful forward motion. The thing is, though, you won’t be listening to this part of the mix for the beats because what’s on top is so beguiling: Clouds’ “Elders” pits a Jamaican roots-reggae vocal (whose voice, rendered here, is reminiscent of dry clay) over a robo-skank and a scrubbed-bright digital keyboard hook. Atki2’s “Winter Buds” fragments and abstracts the jungle classic “Dark Stranger,” by Boogie Times Tribe, 'til it sounds like it’s floating in a sea of milk. (This sounds better than you'd think — much better.) Maga Bo ft. Max Normal’s “Homeboy” features such buzzing instrumentation and such slurred vocals that it sounds like a Muslim hymn as heard through a screen window.

And on and on and on — DJ /rupture has good ears, as we know. But the thing that makes Uproot so potent is that Clayton’s sensibility as a selector has audibly matured. Not just because the first half is mostly medium-tempo, or because he commissioned a string quartet for the mix (Jenny Jones’ “Capilano Bridge,” which /rupture mixes, to somewhat disorienting effect, with Matt Shadetek’s dub mix of Iron Shirt’s “Gave You All My Love”). It’s because Uproot’s sensibility dovetails with that of his earlier mixes, even if it doesn’t sound especially like them.

Uproot isn’t as overt; its transnational selections don’t announce themselves the way they did prior. But there isn’t any need: having shown the joins to such startling effect at the start of the decade, /rupture here is betting on his aesthetic being worth your time simply as music. (Or as simply-music as any can be, anyway.) Even better, he’s winning.