Biography All Music Guide Wikipedia
All Music Guide:
The minimal-to-abstract, somewhat dubby techno of electronic DJ and producer Kit Clayton has appeared on a large number of labels since 1996. Clayton runs several of his own labels, including Cytrax Records and Orthlorng Musorks, but his music -- which has garnered praise from such magazines as The Wire and Muzik -- can also be heard on Stefan Betke's Scape label, as well as Mille Plateaux, Organized Noise, Plug Research, Seventh City, Phthalo and more. Clayton studied at Conneticut's Wesleyan College, learning in the electronic music lab, where he composed interactive pieces. He now works out of his basement studio in San Francisco, not only on music, but on an audio software that helps create systems to generate music with varying randomization -- his "day job." He released the EPs Negative Powers and Unreliable Networks for Cytrax, and debuted on Thomas Brinkmann's Scape label with the praised Nek Purpalet EP in mid-1999. Before the end of the year, full-lengths followed on Drop Beat (Repetition and Nonsense) and Scape (Nek Sanalet). Despite his computer work, Clayton's creations reach beyond "computer music"; for him, computers are just another means of creation to be used along with acoustic, analogue and digital methods. He has also toured Germany, and created a project to pair visual art with electronic music called "the Mimic and the Model."
Wikipedia:
Joshua Kit Clayton, better know by his stage name Kit Clayton, is a San Francisco-based electronic and digital musician and computer programmer. "In addition to his musical work, Joshua is a programmer for Cycling '74, where he is responsible for further development of the Max/MSP MIDI/audio programming environment." He is a significant contributor to Jitter as well, a multi-dimensional data set processing and visualizing architecture with applications in audio, video, and 3d graphics, which is part of the multimedia package Max. Clayton uses Max, MSP, and Jitter extensively in his own abstract musical compositions, which have been described as including aspects of ambient computer music and glitch.
In 2000 Clayton founded and operated his own label, Orthlorng Musork. Musork released seminal works by Akira Rabelais, Alejandra and Aeron, Kevin Blechdom, Blevin Blectum, Blectum from Blechdom, Eight Frozen Modules, Gold Chains, Secret Mommy, Stephan Mathieu, Sutekh, Timeblind, and others, until folding in 2004. Musork announced its final release and the closing of label operations with the following statement:
"Why do we stop? The simple and honest truth is that we want to devote our time to other creative things. We still love music and we will still be active and supportive of the scene. We aren't in financial ruin, we don't think p2p networks have destroyed the music industry, we don't only want to listen to country western, we just want to take on other projects with as much love and intensity as we did this one."
Clayton continues to compose, perform and further develop Max, MSP, and Jitter.
Clayton graduated from Wesleyan University, where he studied electronic music and computer science.
