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The Julius Eastman Memory Depot

by Jace Clayton

supported by
Joe Holt
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Joe Holt "Eastman lived his life veering between irreconcilable extremes." Pitchfork has a great article that provides context: pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17803-jace-clayton-the-julius-eastman-memory-depot/ Favorite track: Evil Nigger: Part I.
Joshua James Amberson
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Joshua James Amberson Jace Clayton has opened my ears to so much music in the last decade. My love of everything from breakcore to the music of Arthur Russell are thanks to him. This conversation with the music of Julius Eastman pushes my ears once again, challenging me to listen in a new way. Favorite track: Gay Guerrilla: Part V.
WiLV
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WiLV Months after getting this it's still on rotation and I still feel like it shifts and morphs into new shapes with every listen. Exquisite.
Pascal.e Mbuyu Vermeulen
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Pascal.e Mbuyu Vermeulen All the tracks are amazing!
THanks to Jace Clayton I got the opportunity to discovr Julius Eastman.
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about

"I interpret the open-ended, irreverent nature of Julius Eastman’s legacy as a call to conversation," explains Jace Clayton, whom some may know as the globetrotting DJ /rupture. "Reverence can be a form of forgetting." Clayton is no stranger to irreverence himself; in fact, he’s built a career around it, ripping unheard and forgotten-about sounds from their original context and sonically re-imagining them while retaining a core of human warmth at the heart of this deconstructive process. On his new album, The Julius Eastman Memory Depot (out March 26th on New Amsterdam Records and the first ever to be released under his own name), Clayton again brings his sense of compassion, wide-eyed exploration, and razor-sharp intellect to the table, but instead of using a variety of sources for inspiration, for the first time, Clayton has chosen a single, if multivalent, subject for his artistic dissection: the life—including music—of gay African-American composer Julius Eastman.

Jace Clayton (also known as DJ /rupture) will release his new album, The Julius Eastman Memory Depot, on March 26 on New Amsterdam Records. On the album, Clayton again brings his sense of compassion, wide-eyed exploration, and razor-sharp intellect to the table, but instead of using a variety of sources for inspiration, for the first time, Clayton has chosen a single, if multivalent, subject for his artistic dissection: the life—including music—of gay African-American composer Julius Eastman.

The Julius Eastman Memory Depot is an auditory repository for the sonic ideas explored in the live performance. On both, Clayton pulls acoustic and digital sounds toward each other by running the the music from each piano through a laptop, where he uses custom-built digital tools informed by his acclaimed Sufi Plug Ins project—one such tool uses the overall volume of the pianos to simultaneously adjust a drone being generated by their pitches—to create an electronic layer built entirely on the pianos’ sound.

Clayton chose to focus on two of Eastman’s longest piano works for the album, “Evil Nigger” and “Gay Guerrilla”, to allow himself as much opportunity as possible to explore the sound and range of the piano, Eastman’s rhythmic and muscular writing, and the internal dynamics of each piece. Recorded with virtuosic pianists David Friend and Emily Manzo at New York City’s world-class Merkin Concert Hall, the pianists’ impeccable instincts gave Clayton freedom to focus on his subtle (and in some cases, dramatic) electronic explorations of the piano’s sonic possibilities. The result is two arresting, labyrinthine new songs created by the two pianos and their own electrified and transformed versions that extend Eastman’s vision for multiple pianos into a truly original type of listening experience.

Clayton’s sole purely original composition on the album,”Callback from the American Society of Eastman Supporters”, acts as a bridge between the album and the live performance, and portrays how the precariousness of Eastman’s work life echoes and resonates with the precariousness of jobs nowadays more than ever. Inspired by the way in which Eastman’s song titles often used humor and confrontation to demonstrate that the world of classical music and the world-we-live-in are intermingled and inseparable, Sufi vocalist Arooj Aftab begins the coda in dry corporate-speak then expands the song with spiritual depth, adding intensity to the piano music while and simultaneously welcoming in the world.

The Julius Eastman Memory Depot proposes a celebration of music-in-motion, of the fragile and the strong and those who live in the outskirts, of that which for various reasons resists easy historicization but deserves to be remembered, reinvented, and set alight anew.

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released March 26, 2013

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Jace Clayton Brooklyn, New York

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