Album: Gold Teeth Thief
Artist: DJ /rupture
Born: Boston, Massachusetts
Released: November 2001
Artist: DJ /rupture
Born: Boston, Massachusetts
Released: November 2001
Genre: Mixtape
With his Harvard education, I prefer to see Jace Clayton (aka DJ /rupture) more as an ethnomusicologist than a mixtape pioneer. His most recent release, Stage Boundary Songs, was created as a musical response to one of my favourite films of recent years, The Act Of Killing, which was directed by Clayton's Harvard classmate Joshua Oppenheimer. The mixtape (available for free download here) seamlessly brings to together old and new Indonesian psychedelic folk, rock, poetry and soul, some of which was released around the time of the country's 1965 coup. There's an early article outlining Clayton's music outlook in the Harvard journal, Cellar Door, emphasising his love for various new and innovative genres from post-rock to hardstep and bhangra. This collision of hardcore dance music with elements of hip hop and "world" music is what came to define DJ /rupture's first release, Gold Teeth Thief. I have a friend at work to thank for introducing me to this wild, high-energy mixtape and it still remains my favourite of all his many releases. Understandably, there aren't any YouTube clips or videos to accompany Gold Teeth Thief's release, but I do like this interview with Clayton that gives an insight into his modus operandi and radio work at WFMU.
Gold Teeth Thief was posted online in 2001 and racked up hundreds of thousands of downloads thanks to positive reviews in music magazines like VIBE. Reviewers pointed out how the music had no boundaries, moving seamlessly from hip hop to dancehall and much else besides. As Clayton mentions in the video above, this porous interchange across cultural boundaries is what he loves most about living in New York. Gold Teeth Thief opens with Missy Elliott's brilliant Get Ur Freak On, with its Timbaland-produced bhangra beats, which are then mixed with an instrumental sample of Nas' Oochie Wally and a rare Jamaican reggae sample. Jungle music features heavily, mixed to wonderful effect with Here I Come, a classic track by dancehall legend Barrington Levy. There's clever use of hip hop fragments from Project Pat, Non Phixion and Wu-Tang Clan which, like the reggae samples of Bounty Killer and Shabba Ranks, act as little islands of familiarity amid the ocean of experimentation. The final track, which combines the Afropop of Paul Simon & Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Miriam Makeba and Muslimgauze, makes for a beautiful finale. Gold Teeth Thief was only given a limited official release, due to its heavy use of sampling -- another famous mixtape, The Grey Album, which blended the Beatles' White Album and Jay-Z's Black Album, faced similar issues. Instead, DJ /rupture has made many of his mixtapes available for free on his website, including the Middle Eastern-tinged Minesweeper Suite and Bidoun Sessions. I'd also recommend securing copies of Special Gunpowder and K-K-Kumbia, both of which are great introductions to Latin music (his Fader article on cumbia is one of the best bits of music writing I've ever read). His mixtapes are not just entertaining, but educational too.
With his Harvard education, I prefer to see Jace Clayton (aka DJ /rupture) more as an ethnomusicologist than a mixtape pioneer. His most recent release, Stage Boundary Songs, was created as a musical response to one of my favourite films of recent years, The Act Of Killing, which was directed by Clayton's Harvard classmate Joshua Oppenheimer. The mixtape (available for free download here) seamlessly brings to together old and new Indonesian psychedelic folk, rock, poetry and soul, some of which was released around the time of the country's 1965 coup. There's an early article outlining Clayton's music outlook in the Harvard journal, Cellar Door, emphasising his love for various new and innovative genres from post-rock to hardstep and bhangra. This collision of hardcore dance music with elements of hip hop and "world" music is what came to define DJ /rupture's first release, Gold Teeth Thief. I have a friend at work to thank for introducing me to this wild, high-energy mixtape and it still remains my favourite of all his many releases. Understandably, there aren't any YouTube clips or videos to accompany Gold Teeth Thief's release, but I do like this interview with Clayton that gives an insight into his modus operandi and radio work at WFMU.
Gold Teeth Thief was posted online in 2001 and racked up hundreds of thousands of downloads thanks to positive reviews in music magazines like VIBE. Reviewers pointed out how the music had no boundaries, moving seamlessly from hip hop to dancehall and much else besides. As Clayton mentions in the video above, this porous interchange across cultural boundaries is what he loves most about living in New York. Gold Teeth Thief opens with Missy Elliott's brilliant Get Ur Freak On, with its Timbaland-produced bhangra beats, which are then mixed with an instrumental sample of Nas' Oochie Wally and a rare Jamaican reggae sample. Jungle music features heavily, mixed to wonderful effect with Here I Come, a classic track by dancehall legend Barrington Levy. There's clever use of hip hop fragments from Project Pat, Non Phixion and Wu-Tang Clan which, like the reggae samples of Bounty Killer and Shabba Ranks, act as little islands of familiarity amid the ocean of experimentation. The final track, which combines the Afropop of Paul Simon & Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Miriam Makeba and Muslimgauze, makes for a beautiful finale. Gold Teeth Thief was only given a limited official release, due to its heavy use of sampling -- another famous mixtape, The Grey Album, which blended the Beatles' White Album and Jay-Z's Black Album, faced similar issues. Instead, DJ /rupture has made many of his mixtapes available for free on his website, including the Middle Eastern-tinged Minesweeper Suite and Bidoun Sessions. I'd also recommend securing copies of Special Gunpowder and K-K-Kumbia, both of which are great introductions to Latin music (his Fader article on cumbia is one of the best bits of music writing I've ever read). His mixtapes are not just entertaining, but educational too.
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