DJ /Rupture "Uproot" a new approach to DJ Mixes

DJ /Rupture and Jah Dan, Greenpoint, Brooklyn August 2008
photo by Stefano Giovannini

The source material from the original DJ Mix is put out as full length unmixed tracks for a look into the process.



by Cole Stryker for Popmatters:

"Uproot is a different animal entirely, a slithering, reptilian creature content to exist beneath the brush. It’s not trying to be clever. It just wants to move the crowd. Returning to Brooklyn after seven years in Barcelona, Rupture has released his most approachable mix yet, blending UK dubstep, German minimalism, and a dozen other sounds from Australia, Sweden, Brazil, and of course Brooklyn. Unlike his previous manic, pummelling mixes, which tend to bombard listeners with so many ideas, Uproot is an assured, laid-back affair. No batteries of breakcore here. This is a record that is just as comfortable on the dance floor as it is in the study.

Rupture was kind enough to include a second disc with Uproot called Ingredients. It’s a humble move that allows the listener to hear the cuts he used to create Uproot in their original, unmixed form.

Dear DJs: Do this from now on.

Not only do we get to enjoy the unadulterated tracks, we gain a deeper appreciation for Rupture’s creativity and finesse. For instance, the innocuous opening synth riff on Clouds’ “Too Much” becomes a menacing salvo when matched with the rumbling guitar distortion of Maga Bo’s “Homeboys”. I checked out Ingredients after a few listens to Uproot, and perhaps this colors my opinion, but Rupture mixes songs in such a way that hearing them in any other context just feels wrong."

Here's the entire review

Ephemeral New York

the Bowery 1895
This beautiful blog remembers forgotten people, places, and relics of the way New Yorkers used to live.
Chases the urban ghosts of beautiful decay.

There's the link.

New Mix from DJ Olive for Plum Industries

DJ Olive is known for many sounds, from beats to sleep to avant-turntablism. In the early 90’s he was an active member of the infamous Williamsburg scene, producing ambient events throughout Brooklyn and Manhattan. He was a founding member of We™, one of the most influential electronic acts to emerge from the U.S. scene in the ninties. As a joke, he gave birth to the term “illbient” and has been credited with founding the illbient movement. As an improvisor he has performed with thousands of world class musicians such as Luc Ferrari, Kim Gordon, Ikue Mori, Uri Caine, John Zorn, Christian Fennez, plus many more. He also co-heads the Agriculture record label.



DJ Olive has prepared a special podcast for ELEVENELEVEN, the TITICACA BBQ MIX, a fun radio piece with friends. Enjoy!

Here's a link to this exceptional audio journey.


TITICACA BBQ MIX
Playlist
“intro” _illstyle live
“lambuna” omar yusuf turaybi _tihama north yemen
“titicaca dawn” _multipolyomni
“animus 1″ _jacob druckman
“siiriri” _kenya
“bukusu” _kenya
“apple au genie” _cambodia
“lets make the most of a beautiful thing” _nancy wilson
“song & dance” _nigeria
“sleep” excerpt _dj olive
“olson” _boards of canada
3 min mini cdr _toshio kajiwara & tim barnes
“conversation” _south america
“if they see” _We™
“nya-be” & “yo bon maa” tumi _upper volta africa
“ziyara al ahamsi” _tihama north yemen
“the click” arieni _south africa
“alegria” _bolivia
“kontakte” _karlheinz stockhausen
“big bambu” _cheach y chong
intro _marlene sai
“lullaby” _upper volta africa
“visions of a new world (phase 1)” _lonnie liston smith & the cosmic echoes
“billy gean” _mathieu boogaerts
“burial dub” _bunny wailer
spanish 7″ battle sound fx record
“poem electronique” _edgar varese
“children and god” _tony schwartz
“coconut song” lamu _kenya
“open the light” _boards of canada
“kwahahalu” _indians of brazil
“ihaha” _indians of brazil
“nefisa(electronique)” _earthling
“evelution of the beast” _autechre mix
“taos hoop dance” _sw native american
“volodya” _angola
“tam pysiambo” _coastal amerindians of guyana
“tea house in tuhayta” _tihama north yemen
“urua” _south america
“legende de chinvong” _cambodia
“english as a second language” talking package
“bone” _once11
“sloop a” jon tye
“i dont sweat” _dave alvin
“aku aku” -south america
“nyatiti” _kenya
“umo one” _khan
“funeral dance” _kenya
“disco love” _ian pooley
“roza” vermeila _brazil
“tonaha” _coastal amerindians of guyana
“ufolo” _angola
“come wi goh dung deh” _linton kwesi johnson
“bamileke bafang” _musiques du cameroun
“giulietta degli spiriti” nino rota
“standing here at the present time” _tony schwartz
“fugi isa” _coastal amerindians of guyana
two intros _marlene sai
bennink / brotzmann fmp
“hemcin trios danses” _turquie
“goodbye my friend” _coastal amerindians of guyana

plus a few extra mystery snibits here and there…

James Healy creates sound mix for National Gallery, Washington DC.

Leo Villareal
Artist's rendering of the Connecting Link
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC.

To listen to the sound pieces for the documentary video, check out the video clips here. The mix was for Leo Villareal's light installation at the National Gallery. James (Escape Arts, Natural Sphere) runs the Agriculture with DJ Olive.



The beginning of the installation of Leo Villareal's LED (light-emitting diode) project designed for the Gallery's Concourse. Villareal's work features movement and light, qualities that make this installation particularly well-suited for the moving walkway between the East and West Buildings, a subterranean area through which thousands of people pass daily. The installation features approximately 40,000 LED nodes that run through channels along the entire length of the connecting link. The artist will program sequences using custom-designed software to create abstract configurations of light through electronic circuitry. Villareal's programming both instructs the light and allows for an element of chance. While it is possible that a pattern will repeat during a viewer's experience, it is highly unlikely. Still, the eye will seek patterns in the motion, a perceptual effect of the hypnotic trailing lights.

More on Leo Villareal's exceptional work here.

New York Times on Haimovitz/ DJ Olive collaboration

Plug in Cello, Add D.J. and Club, Then Stir
By STEVE SMITH

"After the Beethoven, DJ Olive, a turntable improviser, initiated a chiming drone that segued into Nicole Lizée’s “Cryptograms.” Layering fuzz and crackle, throbbing pulsations and snatches of recorded speech, DJ Olive fashioned a teeming sonic environment. Mr. Haimovitz’s composed lines clambered through the din, offering a running commentary.

Here, performing in an idiom intended for loudspeakers, Mr. Haimovitz and DJ Olive sounded like equal partners. Still better was Tod Machover’s “VinylCello.” Mr. Machover, long a leading innovator in musical technology, is also a cellist. Surely that explained why he was able to showcase Mr. Haimovitz’s ardent lyricism and DJ Olive’s sharp reflexes with equal assurance."

For review here.

Triage, A New Album from DJ Olive

out now on label Room 40

DJ Olive
Triage
By Dimitri Nasrallah

DJ Olive’s Gregor Asch originally emerged out of the same Crooklyn Dub Consortium scene that typified the illbient period of bass-centric frequencies during the ’90s, coming up with very early emissions from the likes of the Bug, Spectre, and bass-orientalists like We and Badawi. He’s since moved down the two parallel paths that forged illbient, preferring to separate his records into straight-out break-beat experiments via labels like the Agriculture or textbook ambient compositions, which have emerged with increasing regularity via Australian label Room 40. Triage follows 2006’s Sleep and constitutes another nuanced edition into the warm drones that wouldn’t be out of place on a Stars of the Lid album. Like SOTL, Triage’s hour-long evolution is intended as a soundtrack for sleep, and so the sounds that emerge in the wash of warm Moog and turntable samples, not to mention occasional light percussion and a trumpet that brings to mind Miles Davis’s In a Silent Way, never interrupt the fall backwards into unconsciousness so much as accentuate it. True to its promise, this album really does send its listeners tumbling softly into dreams. (Room 40)

Pitchfork names our new DJ /Rupture Release Best New Music

"...he's in the rare category of DJs who gives the impression that he is not just wading through music, but correcting it by building his own canon, and constructing an alternate history. It's a place you would want to live."

Full review here.

DJ Olive: Wall Street Journal

At a packed downtown Manhattan nightclub earlier this month, the cellist Matt Haimovitz teamed up with DJ Olive in an eclectic mash-up that veered from a Beethoven cello sonata to a strange duet that set Mr. Haimovitz's frenetic bowing against the turntable's hallucinatory electronic sounds. A crowd sipped beers and looked spellbound as Mr. Haimovitz improvised seamless transitions between movements, building up to a fully improvised cadenza. "There are certain movements where, as it would happen in the 18th century, we make it up on the spot," Mr. Haimovitz says.

Full article here.

Samurai.fm

Photographer Matt Cheetham's incredible online streaming radio site Samurai.fm.

Here the link to the Agriculture's Radio show on Samurai.

DJ Olive at the Whitney Biennial 2008

The Guitar Room by DJ Olive




Traige



Installation Walk Through


From the Whitney Website:

"DJ Olive the Audio Janitor (Gregor Asch) applies his skills as a DJ and turntablist to create atmospheric multimedia events that broaden conventional definitions of listening to music. Delivering both danceable bass-heavy sets and quieter, ambient soundscapes to large audiences in clubs, warehouses, and music festivals, Olive’s musical aesthetic features layered and looped urban noises reflecting the chaotic character of his Brooklyn, New York, home base. He uses computers and turntables to appropriate and combine incongruous audio clips—ranging from street sounds to previously recorded world music, drum ‘n’ bass, hip-hop, and dub—into songs that contain trancelike, melodic, groovy logics.

As a musician who composes, produces, distributes, and performs his collaged sound projects, Olive sees his events, which incorporate visual elements such as light shows and video screenings, as “voyages” that are at once performance art and positive, community-building political actions. His projects unfold on massive scale, transcending the typical club environment by harnessing the transformative powers of sound through colossal— and in at least one work literally global—takeovers. In 1997, as part of their opera Quark Soup, Olive’s collective Multipolyomni offered participants The Solar Drama: a view of the sun perpetually rising, broadcast live from 127 consecutive locations during one of Earth’s rotations, as seventy-seven performers and artists hosted a gigantic sound installation.

Olive’s visionary approach to entertaining developed during the 1990s as he pioneered an electronic music scene centered around what is now called roof music. For the 2002 Whitney Biennial, Olive organized Roof Music: Sunrise on a Rooftop in Brooklyn, a sound installation that sought the cultural unification of all participants. Complementing the throbbing dance music, he alternately held “sleeping pill” events—quiet, sonically ambient sleepovers—to promote relaxation. Olive has written a new sleeping pill composition for the 2008 Biennial, to be played inside an installation offering viewers a cozy space to close their eyes and kick up their feet. Equating these soft, soothing sounds with medicinal healing, he seeks to provide comfort and stress relief to his audience. Though his complex sampling still reflects a tension implicit to city dwelling, Olive’s music grows more hypnotic as he becomes increasingly interested in uniting people." TRINIE DALTON

Rupture "Uproot" Makes FACT top mix list

"Compiled in September 2007 but released in 2008, Uproot was less about Jace Clayton’s considerable DJ-ing skills -- though he still plays off three decks -- and more about creating a mood. Full-on ambient at times, contributors include chamber musician Jenny Jones and Dutty Artz labelmate Matt Shadetek, but although you're always very aware while listening to Uproot that you're dealing with a man abundant in both talent and taste, it's never turntablism for the sake of showing off; more the creation of space and texture through blending and recontextualising. "

Complete list and article here.

DJ /Rupture Video logs over 150,00 views on Youtube

Here the link.