DJ /rupture

You know when you ask someone, “What do you listen to?”, and they respond with, “I listen to everything”? Everything being a narrow diet of surf rock, pop nostalgia on a Thursday, and three songs by The Cure? Everything, somewhere, at one point in time.

If  DJ /rupture (Jace Clayton) said “everything”, he’d mean it in the truest sense of the word: cumbia, dubstep, afropop, footwork, hip-hop, rabòday, church music... The list goes on. Clayton came highly recommended by a friend who had discovered him via Absorb(ed) this year. Clayton’s mixes are sonic travelogues and, evidently, multimedia. So it is only fitting that the Mix of this Week takes the form of a hybrid review of Clayton’s 2016 book Uproot: Travels in 21st-Century Music and Digital Culture and his accompanying BOOK NRG MIX.

“For those who believe in the power of community, the question of how to unite bodies scattered in space and time may be one of the most important issues music can explore answers to.”

This is perhaps the guiding inquiry in Uproot, which chronicles Clayton’s observations of the intersection between music, technology and culture – be it autotune’s uptake in the Maghreb or the bridges that streaming platforms offer for a saludo(shout-out) at sonidero parties (more on which later) to be better heard across time and space. 

More than Clayton may have ever anticipated, streaming platforms are scrambling to capture listener attention by flattening and rendering frictionless the experience of consuming music. For Clayton at both the intellectual and artistic levels, the DJ—or, more precisely, their communion with a dancefloor—is the vehicle to unite bodies scattered in space and time.

To listen to a DJ /rupture set is to experience time non-linearly, weaving through historical flashes while necessarily moving forward. Music can send our minds backwards; but it must be heard forwards:  

“Zeitgeist heartbeats. A three-minute pop song can stop time, as sure as a three-second sample can conjure up decades of history. Music clocks speed of our age—then runs it down or winds it up or makes it funky as the moment requires.”

Clayton’s music deconstructs borders, both temporal and spatial. Sonic cultures are treated with a respect and clear aversion to the Western pop hegemony’s exoticism of so-called ‘world music’. In one section of Uproot, Clayton describes seeing the Numbulwar group, Yilia, perform at the World Music Expo: ‘[f]our white guys in jeans and button-up shirts’ playing alongside Aboriginal artists ‘wearing only bright red loincloths, complicated headbands, and lots of white body paint’:

“An Indian American woman who managed some African hip-hop acts stood at my side and asked, ‘What do you think?’  … The music was anodyne, but what really rubbed me the wrong way was how the band had assigned duties. The white guys got to wear Western casual. The [Aboriginal artists]? They had thongs and face paint (and little else). The onus of authenticity, so important to World Music audience-performer dynamics, lay on them. The brown guys. Demonstrating one’s authenticity is work, after all, so this division of labor struck me as lopsided, especially considering that their music was based on a fusion approach where mix-and-match was king. Why didn’t the visuals reflect that?

‘Maybe I’d like them more if the white men were wearing the red thongs and body paint, and the black guys had on jeans and tucked-in polos,’ I said to her…” 

On spatial borders, one of the most interesting sections of Uproot regarded the cumbia sonidera saludo culture in Mexican sound-system parties—personalised shoutouts given during DJ sets that unite a crowd with the world beyond the dancefloor in bonds of longing and homesickness:

“The beautiful inefficiency with which a cumbia sonidera saludo (shout-out) makes its way in the world deepens the import of the messages it contains. Bound up in the transmission in the beauty of acknowledgement: your name was sounded at this party in Queens, your absence was noted, a few kind words to you were witnessed by the crowd, atop the music. Airing personal messages this way reminds us that these stories of distance and love tap into a shared condition familiar to every immigrant.”

Technology is a double-edged sword for uniting bodies. One particular challenge that Clayton identifies is the increased accessibility and risk of homogeneity that music production softwares offer. Reflecting on the rise of FL Studio, Clayton notes that “[t]he features that propel Fruit’s global adoption simultaneously consolidate the type of music produced and make it more difficult for other, less computer-friendly music to survive the transition to digital.”

What does this all mean for how we should consume music? Unsurprisingly, Clayton is sceptical of Big Music. In making a craft from playing other people’s music, deejays occupy a difficult space within the mainstream music industry. Uprootsuccinctly observes that “[v]iral culture doesn’t play well with intellectual property laws.” Not that a mix-album deal is the end game for Clayton, who remarks, “[w]ord-of-mouth buzz and bootleg mixes are the DJ’s symbolic currency; live shows provide the cash.” In any case, attempts to objectively value music are grappled with throughout Uproot:

“[M]usic fosters exchange while being suspicious of authority and ownership. How do you measure a song? Three minutes (time), four megabytes (space), $1 to own, or 0.00012 cents per stream (money, barely). The best measurements can’t be quantified. When one song takes root in the countless people who memorise it. When a chorus lifts a roomful of strangers into a shared emotion. The sound track to a first kiss that’s able to stop lovers in their tracks decades later. The value of those songs lies in us.”

“The big labels want music to equal money, but as much as anything else, music is memory, as priceless and worthless as memory…  I don’t want to haggle over how many micro-cents I get paid per stream or other token gestures toward compensation… A great musical experience exceeds any monetary value you could assign it precisely by immersing you in a world where worth is created in radically different ways from what the market teaches us—therein lies the freedom and the rub. If it were otherwise, these sounds we’re all chasing would be a lot less beautiful.”

For all that I agree with Clayton, I couldn’t help but feel that Uproot sometimes risked veering into a dangerous idealism. Lamenting the shutdown of OiNK—an invitation-only network for music torrenting—in 2007, Clayton writes in Chapter 9:

“Unauthorized file-sharing is so much easier now—and less necessary with the rise of streaming. The overall movement is toward more ways to share music and ideas with like-minded individuals on the Internet. The way I see it, this can only be a good thing for music fans. And what musician is not first a music fan?”

True enough, but how many musicians—or studio engineers or songwriters—are in as fortunate a position to prioritise their music being shared over being remunerated for their work? While a lot could be gained from ‘musicalising’ money (cf monetising music), which Clayton expounds on towards the end of the book, I finished Uproot feeling unsure about how we ought to mobilise to reach this position. Ultimately, I agree with Clayton far more than I disagree, and Uproot is far less a polemic than it is a highly worthwhile read on music and digital culture. And with that, I leave the reader with two passages to move forward with:

“Whatever the future is, it starts with us. One doesn’t have to travel to another country or learn saxophone repair to help create a better world for music and those who love it.”

“DJing doesn’t have to always kowtow to the pleasure principle, and that there’s a world outside the club.”

With listening comes responsibility, and reading Uproot was a reminder of the sheer privilege and joy of getting to write for Redshift about the music I love with that hope that, maybe, you will too. 

Joseph Negrine

27 May 2026