With so much music being released every day, strategic listening and contextualization is an art form, of which Jace Clayton (aka DJ /rupture) is a master. He carries the flame for connoisseurship in an era of dilettantism, rejecting rapid consumption and quantity-over-quality: The best is out there; with patience, we can find it, and weave it into a story that says something penetrating about how it feels to be alive, right now. On the surface, Uproot is simply a potent array of music, mixed in a deep field by someone with exquisitely exotic tastes. More fundamentally, it’s a thesis on the collapse of musical borders—between listener and artist, between regional styles, between genres—that has characterized the internet age. On a universal thread of drums and bass, Clayton draws out seamless connections between Brooklyn and Afghanistan, dubstep and ragga, hearing and making. Music is revealed, actually not-ruptured, in all its splendid commonality. For Clayton there are, at most, two kinds: Wonderful music, which should be collected, pondered, and put into a dialogue; and non-wonderful music, for which one simply has no time. –Brian Howe



Listen: DJ /rupture: “Reef”