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Music

DJ/Rupture

DJ/RUPTURE with VENUS X, POIRIER, MAGA BO, TORRO TORRO, DOS MUNDOS and others at Sunnyside Pavilion (1755 Lake Shore West), Sunday (August 26), 2 pm to midnight. Free. See listing.


Jace Clayton knows something about mixing disciplines. He’s a journalist, radio show host and a prolific trawler for left-field sounds, but he’s probably best known as NYC-based DJ/Rupture.

The anything-goes approach to work and genre makes him a suitable headliner for Fire On The Water, a multidisciplinary, summer’s-end pool party happening Sunday at Sunnyside. Well-versed in cumbia, the popular Latin American 2/4 stomp, he’ll play alongside global bass nonconformists like Venus X, a Harlem-reared DJ known for her scene-collating Ghe2o Goth1k parties, Montreal soca and dancehall enthusiast Poirier and local “pan-Latino” DJ crew Dos Mundos.

“I’m an idealist about music and music’s possibilities,” says Clayton. “So I’m very interested in collaborating with others, and I have an enormous curiosity and desire to shake things up.”

Clayton, who didn’t grow up in a particularly musical household, says it was a bootleg compilation cassette of Japanese noise called Eat Shit Noise Music that got him engaged with music and poking into its stranger pockets. Almost 10 years ago, before the 24/7 hyper-saturation of internet culture began, he launched the now well-known blog Mudd up! after discovering that “there were blogs posting about African music in English – and you could download it!”

Though Clayton, who recently developed a set of “Sufi” plug-ins for Ableton Live based on the North African musical scale, is clearly not a technophobe, he does have reservations about the internet’s omnivorous propensities – especially concerning the consumption of sounds like baile funk or reggaeton rendered temporarily cool by the Western music press.

“You can download 5 gigabytes of kuduro if you want to, but does it tell you anything about the situation in Angola?” he says, referring to the authoritarian stasis in the southern African nation.

His plug-ins expand the arsenals of Western producers, but Rupture wants to open-source the software so it’s compatible with what northern African musicians use. It’s like musical fair trade, enabling responsible sonic excavation.

“There’s a lot of social data that’s missing,” Clayton says. “Like, who is making this music, how are people dancing to it, what are the beefs surrounding it?”

music@nowtoronto.com | twitter.com/nowtorontomusic

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