Rockin' Our Turntable: DJ / rupture & Matt Shadetek
By Veronica Murtagh in Arts & Entertainment on Nov 20, 2009 7:40PM
Call it fate or label it luck, some musical pairings were just meant to happen. Solo, Jace Clayton (DJ / rupture) and Brooklyn producer Matt Shadetek have always excelled in their respective electronic pursuits. For the Barcelona-bred, now Brooklyn-based Clayton that means broad ranging, world-influenced heavy bass and for Shadetek, the lesser known (but no less talented) name of the duo, it means a career built on genre-shifting instrumentals. The duo have combined talents in the past, but never with the depth and stunning results of their newest effort, the full length mix album, Solar Life Raft.
Solar Life Raft was released earlier this month, but it could just as easily have come from 1995 or 2020. Combining disparate styles and sounds with effortless elegance, Clayton and Shadetek create an aural journey across borders and through time. Solar Life Raft stays fresh and innovative by culling an extensive roster of guests including fellow Brooklynites Telepathe and Gang Gang Dance, poets Elizabeth Alexander (who spoke at Obama's inauguration) and Caroline Bergvall, London grime producer Mizz Beats and French avant-garde musician Luc Ferrari. The duo reveal their keen production and curatorial talents by combining the unrelated genres of their collaborators into an ingenious and never jarring statement on what electronic music can be when you look past stylistic and geographic borders.
The 25 short cuts that compose Solar Life Raft dip through atmospheric dubstep, Finnish folk, Arabic dance, blip beep IDM noise, reinterpreted classical compositions, bass-heavy grime and Afro-Caribbean dub, all layered with a veil of subtle, minimal details that make the album an intensely immersive work. The words lent by poets Alexander and Bergvall make for two of the album's more startling selections, brief nonsensical musings that interrupt instrumentals but are, at the same time, a vocal extension of the atmospheric compositions they surround.
DJ / Rupture and Matt Shadetek's Solar Life Raft traverses space, time and continents. Engaging from the first beat to the last, it's an album that is best listened to, not read about. So, what're you waiting for?
Devlin & Darko with DJ / Rupture & Matt Shadetek and DJ Trew tonight, at the Empty Bottle, 1035 N Western, 10 p.m., rsvp@emptybottle.com by 5 p.m. for FREE entry or $10 at door, 21+.