DJ/Rupture steals the stars from the sky

Ripping its way around the net several years ago, the Gold Teeth Thief mix was the first challenger to Coldcut’s 70 Minutes of Madness crown and its raucous melange reacted fiercely against the fake rules of DJing, the artificial boundaries saying what music you can/can’t play in different environments and how to put that music together. But unlike Coldcut’s studio-recorded set, Rupture recorded his live on three turntables.

Like a few of my favourite DJs – Optimo, Mark N, Bec Paton, Glimmer Twins, even Certified Bananas – he sits somewhere between Simon Reynold’s two schools of music fan, neither strictly genreist or populist, instead, right where the best DJs should be, unwrapping music.

He tears through sets, cutting up tracks he obviously loves with complete irreverence. Soaring Middle Eastern voices ride nasty basslines, Crunk anthems bump against big time pop tunes and searing junglist breakbeats play host to chatting ragga MCs, somehow it all makes a global rhythmic sense that’s a hell of a long way from your local record shop’s World Music section.

As well as DJing, recording for labels including Tigerbeat6, Soul Jazz and his own Soot Records, Rupture, real name Jace Clayton, also runs one of the best MP3 blogs around, Mudd Up!. Covering grime to favela to screw to breakcore to Moroccan chants to whatever else – and always coupled with equally incisive readable commentary. In a world of music that just keeps getting wider, he’s becoming one of my favourite filters on it all. He’s been interviewed about music plenty of times, so I bounced him a handful of questions about technology, music and the future.

What decisions do you make when you’re thinking of hosting a song?

It has to be quality of course, and it also has to be useful – something that is not already digitized and floating around. 90% of the time, I only host music I own, and as far as I know, it’s music that tends not to be ripped – from vinyl, cassettes, CDs – it’s cool that blogs post mainstream commercial tunes that you can readily find on P2P networks, but Mudd Up! is more like … decentertainment. I like posting amazing songs by bands or artists people haven’t really heard of or are hard to get even for fans, like rips of expensive grime 12″s, or gems from African CD-Rs I get from Moroccan and Senegalese shops here in Spain. Part of the whole point is that hotness is everywhere, not just in the handful of tightly controlled music labels and media outlets who spend money to create demand.

What sort of feedback do you get?

Most people just download and don’t say anything! The public and artists who read regularly appreciate it though, I do get thank-you emails, often as basic as ‘thanks for posting this kind of music, it’s so hard to learn about where I live’. Plus folks understand that I’m sharing music I like & writing about it and all for free.

What do you think of the recent case in Australia, where mp3s4free.net went down for linking to music hosted elsewhere? Do you see any precedent for MP3 blogs in general?

That is completely absurd, both in terms of moral standards and ideological reasoning, and in terms of possibilities for enforcement. Making links to free music hosted in other countries illegal on Australian sites is like arresting fish for being wet.

Precedents, of course. Radio itself: it’s a freely accessible technology that allows people to broadcast & talk about music and lets people at home copy what they like. (the fact that taping from radio is seen as legal fair use, and mp3 copying is viewed as piracy is ludicrous– the legality of identical acts changes with the fidelity of the medium) of course radio’s structure is one transmitter and thousands of receivers: it’s free culture, but its top-down, controlled. Blogs spring up like weeds, their architecture is much closer to the P2P standard of thousands of transmitters and thousands of receivers.

What do you think of the impact of technology on the music industry? Do you think it is set for a shakeup? Or will the current players get everything under control?

What do you mean by ‘current players’? The music industry is a strange ecology populated by the audience/consumers, artists and producers, and incredibly dense layers of lawyers and distributors and managers and bureaucracy and whatnot in between.

Will fans keep on sharing and talking about music they love? yes.

Will labels keep trying to force a rapidly-aging business plan using legal arm-wringing? yes.

What do you think are the biggest issues at the moment?

Structural equality in the developing world. Access to drinkable water. AIDS in Africa… Oh you mean music? heh-heh. The big issue is no big issues.

Don’t get it twisted: MP3s and legality is not a big issue. Labels and lawyers are trying to push that notion into the public, but it’s hardly the case. There is no piracy crisis. Now’s the best time EVER to be a music fan. We have an unprecedented wealth of choices. Now is the best time EVER to be making music: the barriers to entry are at their lowest, you can record an album with an inexpensive PC running free open source linux software. Moreover, the ease of distribution is incredible. At least 80,000 people have downloaded my Gold Teeth Thief mix, I just put it online to share it with friends and it exploded exponentially.

There is, as always, a shocking amount of misguided corporate greed, but that’s nothing new. The obvious global consensus is that official CD prices are unreasonably high. The CD industry is _aided_ by the fact that people will get free MP3s of artists they would not otherwise hear of and get excited enough to pay exorbitant prices for the full audio CD. People sharing files is what people always have done Rampant bootlegging is market forces as work. Russian, China, India, and Africa: in all these countries it is easier to find a bootleg CD than a ‘real’ ‘official’ version. That is the cutting edge. RIAA-style litigation, Australia link case-style absurdities are almost surreal approaches to stem the tide.

Are there any really radical options being put forward?

The radical, extremist options are what is regularly put forward by the major labels and organizations like America’s RIAA. Trying to stop fans from sharing excerpts of music online – free advertising, unlike the millions of payola labels give to radios each year to ensure airplay – is radical. Trying to force consumers to still feel satisfied by spending $12-20 on a shiny plastic circle is radical.

Paid downloads are ridiculous as well. All this upheaval or evolution of whatever you wanna call it just marks an emphasis back on performance, back on realtime music. It has long been the case that most large bands earn more money by Selling T-Shirts than they do be playing shows, and virtually all musicians they earn more money by playing shows than they do my selling albums.

So it’s possible for bands to sell fewer CDs now but continue to grow in popularity. Whether people are buying or downloading your music, though, if you come to town and perform a lot of those people will pay to go to the show. So eventually record labels will focus more on ‘artist management’, with a special emphasis on cutting into the tour profits– which traditionally labels do not earn money from. Yeah, I think soon, you know, to sign with Matador (a fake indie owned by a major label) you´ll have to commit to giving away a percentage of your live profit to the label; or labels will force artists to use their in-house booking agents. It’s a negative view but I think labels will rapidly realize that live performances will ALWAYS be an income source, and although that is not their territory, it will be easier for them, in the long run, to go parasitic on artists that way.

The music industry is stunningly corrupt, by the way. Much more corrupt than drug cartels, and almost as corrupt as corporate interests lobbying government officials in Washington D.C.

If you haven’t heard the Gold Teeth Thief mix, download it immediately from Negrophonic complete with a full tracklisting. Mudd Up! is equally essential, you have to check his current piece on indie acts selling out, from Dabrye, P73 and Oval to Stereolab, Alias and M.I.A.