Audio Poverty

DJ / Rupture

“Case gradually became aware of the music that pulsed constantly
through the cluster. It was called dub, a sensuous mosaic
cooked from the vast libraries of digitalized pop; it was
worship, Molly said, and a sense of community,” 1 so writes William
Gibson in his cyberpunk classic Neuromancer, conjuring
up the neo-tribal listening habits of a Rasta community in the
not too distant future.
If you believe Jace Clayton, aka DJ/rupture, the international
DJ, producer and blogger from Brooklyn, this sound of the future
has long since arrived in the here and now: “I think those
future rastas in Neuromancer were bumping Kode 9’s Kingstown
alongside Augustus Pablo”,2 he wrote in his Mudd Up!
blog in 2005.
By following his website www.negrophonic.com’s introductory
call to “please sink deep“ and drift in the depths of the Mudd
Up! universe, it’s hard to escape the impression that the writer
is himself a virtual character from Gibson’s novel, Pattern Recognition3,
a science-fiction thriller. The quantity of Rupture’s
output and activities is formidable.

Rupture is the example par excellence of the highly praised Internet
data-jungle pioneer. He combines the bass-heavy sound
of new world music, which he passionately promotes, with political
nuances and references from literature, film and art. With
a diverse group of like-minded individuals, he also runs the independent
labels Soot and Dutty Artz, plays in the band Nettle,
moderates a weekly show on New York’s WFMU 91.1 FM, writes
reviews and essays for publications like The Washington Post,
Abitare, n+1, Frieze, The Fader and The National, gives lectures
and takes part in artist discussions.

Rupture first drew the attention of a wider audience with Gold
Teeth Thief4, which was initially released on the Internet. The
mixtape, comprising 68 minutes and 43 tracks from a wide
spectrum of styles, from contemporary R’n’B, to breakcore,
ragga, Arabic folk, through to Luciano Berio’s electro-acoustic
sound experiments, swiped gold from the era’s omnipresent
mash-up aesthetic. Mixed live on three decks, often all running
concurrently, the sounds flow fantastically to form the roots that
envelop a world of transnational bass migration.
Today, blog light-years later, this daring act of bling-deconstruction
remains a milestone, calling forth countless imitators.
Global bass has become a genre in its own right.
DJ/rupture continues to map out the musical genealogy of an
ancient future with his new (and first entirely officially licensed)
mix album Uproot. He remains dedicated to what a self-declared
bass-visionary has to do – discerning borders and then
tearing them down before our very eyes.

Brian Shimkovitz / Awesome Tapes From Africa

At another end of the same continuum we find the likewise
Brooklyn-based Brian Shimkovitz, a music journalist and African
music expert. Since April 2006 his Awesome Tapes from
Africa5 blog has exposed the online community to rare musical
nuggets from Africa, where tape cassettes still are the dominant
music medium. Shimkovitz’s blog serves as a kind of open
archive where visitors can find an extremely diverse range of
albums and compilations converted into MP3s – including
scanned cover images and, where possible, accompanied by
brief comments providing information about the respective
time and place of origin. The result is a loosely arranged catalogue
of various genres of African music, which most Western
listeners will probably not be familiar with: Guinean griot music,
hiplife from Ghana, Senegalese rap, Agbadza war chants
from West Africa and Jùjú music from Nigeria. Most of the music
available is from tapes acquired by Shimkovitz in the course
of his two extended trips to Ghana as a student of music ethnology.
He has extensively documented the experiences and
insights gathered from his travels on another blog, The Hiplife
Complex 6, which comprises reports as well as sound and video
recordings that give his academic research a cultural context.
Shimkovitz thus enables access to music by artists who,
for all the success and popularity they may enjoy back home,
are largely unknown outside their respective regional market;their lack of international distributors makes them difficult to
acquire. Unlike Seattle-based Sublime Frequencies 7 and other
labels that turn musical souvenirs from distant lands (frequently
sampled from radio broadcasts) into off-beat compilations
for lucrative profits on their own markets while failing to name
the artists heard, Shimkovitz does not earn a single cent from
his activities. Fans of African music in all corners of the broadband-
connected developed world have shown their gratitude
for his commitment through countless downloads and enthusiastic
comments. It also appears that the odd pale-faced Indie
boy may have chanced upon on Awesome Tapes from Africa
in their search for inspiration. The self-titled album from
New York indie newcomers Vampire Weekend, at least, was
clearly influenced by the polyrhythms and guitar sounds of Afro-
beat and proved to be the big surprise on last year’s ”Best
of” lists 8. London DJ / producer duo Radioclit immediately took
this development a solid step further by recording a cover of
Vampire Weekend’s Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa with Malawian
singer Esau Mwamwaya for their The Very Best collaboration
– and the resulting track indeed sounds like genuine, fully-
fledged Afro-pop.

Marcus Bartos

1 William Gibson: Neuromancer, Ace Books, New York 1984, 67 2 Source: www.negrophonic.
com/words/pivot/entry.php?id=271#comm 3 William Gibson: Pattern Recognition, G.
P. Putnam’s Sons, New York 2003 4 www.negrophonic.com/goldteeththief.htm 5 awesometapesfromafrica.
blogspot.com 6 thehiplifecomplex.blogspot.com 7 www.sublimefrequencies.
com 8 Cf. www.popkulturjunkie.de/wp/?p=4004