Gold Teeth Thief

One of the great audio troves of our time resides on Jace Clayton’s website for his professional alias, DJ /rupture. A dozen mixes, free for downloading, reside there—freewheeling and thought-through, they’re worth knowing, and they contain a lot of amazement. But the first is by definition un-toppable. I encountered it on CD at Kim’s Video in New York, in the fall of 2011, though Clayton had made it earlier, on three turntables. “I put it on the internet so my friends could listen,” he later wrote. “Who else would? One magazine reviewed it, then another, and soon a lot of magazines, leading to hundreds of thousands of downloads.” The mix’s resonances with 9/11 seemed eerie at the time and remain potent. But they’re less relevant than the sheer devil-may-care of it—from Missy to the Makeba/Muslimgauze/Simon/Ladysmith finale, it’s an argument for DJ culture as a cultural commonplace as well as for its radical promise.