New Year's Rupture

Boxing Day in Calgary I met up with some old friends to consume a near dangerous amount of liquor, achieving a near spiritual inebriety. One of those friends is Vancouver DJ Jesse Proudfoot, who will attempt to induce similar sonic affect this New Year's Eve, with DJ Kuma, and the inimitable mash-up master DJ Rupture at Video in Studios.

I asked Proudfoot a few questions on Boxing Day to profile him for BR , but I must admit, awash as we were in rum, the answers and questions evade me. Back in the day we shared records, and now, years later, when a rockabilly band that preceded him on Boxing Day started riffing on Elvis, Proudfoot intoned "Elvis was a hero to most," to which I could reply only: "He never meant shit to me..." Jesse probably knows more than I do about music now, which is saying something, and makes him the perfect candidate for DJ, a title that far too many take, and so few deserve. Proudfoot's take is decidedly eclectic, but never quaint, and he will make you dance. Jesse gets to London's pirate radio underground from where you ought to, having a background in garage, and jungle. He'll spin Wiley, So-Solid Crew, but with Bhangra, and if you're lucky, the Happy Mondays, or a soul obscurity that only he knows. His unselfconscious appropriation and bricolage makes him worth spending New Year's sweating, along with his technical ability, and taste, which is to admit the obvious... a DJ is a connoisseur.

I don't know much about DJ Kuma, except that his profile on the Kospiracy Group website references Genesis P-Orrige, which must mean that, as a dub, downtempo, and ambient DJ, his set may mess up your thinking about normally somnambulistic genres, and maybe will fuck you up generally, creeping into your room after the show, and sit on your chest like that little devil in Dore.

But maybe the deepest crates belong to the headliner, DJ Rupture, aka Jace Clayton, whose mash-up masterpiece 'Special Gunpowder' is one of my favorite records. Rupture infuses selections at the level of a second-tier reader. Making you shake your ass to radical interpolations and expansions from music as text. He uses hip-hop and dancehall's lyrical innovation as a surface to hurl conflicting textures and styles like a little kid anarchically cracking-up die-cast cars. The resulting pile-up answers the criticism of DJ music in general, that it is non-productive, and that the combinatory value does not equal the sum of its parts, except to make slick mixes to make shimmy. DJ's like Rupture, aware of the production of exchange value, actually tend to enhance the value of the parts, while making music that is compulsively danceable, or sublimely abrasive.