DJ Rupture Hacked Western Music Software With Middle Eastern Sounds

In a 2008 interview Jace Clayton laid out a manifesto of sorts. "I don't care what 'Westerners' fetishize. They've been fetishizing black people for centuries now, who cares? You simply exist in all your complexity and let them deal with it."

Since he came to prominence over a decade ago through his border-melting work as DJ / rupture, Jace has continued to argue against a cohesive narrative of identity production. Long before the mashup, rupture was rocking three turntables and pulling Project Pat, Paul Simon, and Japanese noise god Hanatarash into his legendary sets. His music criticism and writing makes equally unexpected and satisfying turns, arguing for auto-tune as a cyborg embrace or exploring geopolitical complexity through the club scene in Cyprus.

His latest project, Sufi Plug-Ins, gets even weirder. It tells the story of his ongoing love affair with Morocco through a set of seven free audio tools designed for the audio sequencing program Ableton Live. This is a world where Berber women build drum machines and synthesizers silence themselves in time for prayer.

The plug ins remix Western music software with an Eastern bent. They include four distinct synthesizers hardwired to North African and Arabic maqam scales, with quartertone tuning built-in, a device called Devotion which lowers your computer's volume five times a day for prayer – presets include Agnostic, Fervent, Devout – and a drone machine. The interface is written in the Berber language of Tamazigh, using their neo-Tifinaght script. Roll-over texts provide fragments of Sufi poetry, plus a little Jean Toomer. Says Jace, "Plug-ins, by definition, are about interdependency."

Jace’s search for a way to translate non-Western techniques and melodies to Western software began in Spain, where he had been jamming out with a community of Moroccan musicians. While working with a violinist named Abdelhak Rahal, he saw that the default 4/4 beat and structures of his music software was not the default for Rahel. That started him thinking about how software dictates how music is supposed to sound.

Rhythm wasn’t the only divide to cross. Moroccan polyrhythms and Arabic maqams are painstaking to impossible to re-create in most music production software. The MIDI keyboards that many musicians use to control the software, for instance, keeps them tethered to a Western twelve tone scale. Sufi Plug Ins explode a small piece of that challenge by modifying the pitches played by the keyboard, twisting it into maqam territory, replicating the Eastern scale – and the legendary arrangements of notes that fuel the rich folk history of North African music.

“I’d been following Moroccan music from afar for the past 15 years or so — trust me, I couldn’t get any more information from the internet! So I had to go there,” Jace says. “I’m against the idea that you can just download a song from elsewhere and know what it's about, what it means, how to flip it.”

In the summer of 2011, Jace, producer Mago Bo, photographer John Francis Peters and I, landed in Casablanca to organize a month long residency called Beyond Digital Morocco. Few of us spoke French, fewer spoke Darija. We all came nonetheless, believing deeply in the possibilities of music and art to speak for us where language could not. In essence, we wanted to know what the world might look like if the DJ was the NGO. “In many ways, the musical information contained in an MP3 is the least important thing about music,” says Jace. "I’m fascinated by music as a social activity, how songs move bodies, how it comes to life between people."

After eighteen months of planning between four continents, we found ourselves crammed into a three bedroom apartment in Casablanca, hiding half our crew from the landlady so she wouldn’t charge us double for utilities. There were fresh mango and avocado shakes in the morning and the hazy calm of boiling hash and sticky sweet mint tea in the evenings. Days were spent in the back of leathery taxi seats traveling to meet musicians, studio owners, distributors and anyone else we could track down a mobile number for who might tell us about the intersections of music and technology in North Africa.

From one angle, the Sufi Plug Ins document the complexity of our time in Morocco and highlight the challenges we face as we continue with the project. Sufi Plug Ins v.2 are likely to be available as VSTs, ensuring compatibility with Cubase, FruityLoops, and other music software widely used in Africa and the Middle East. And they will focus on the relationships Jace has been building with musicians in Egypt since a trip he made to Cairo in the spring.

“I’m dying to go back because the city is incredible and kids there are making the most amazing music with their laptops,” he says. "Sufi Plug Ins v.2 will be built around me taking requests from them and then building custom-tools, so they can do something that was previously impossible with the Western software they use, like weird vocoders tuned to Egyptian scales. The normal flow is that software is mass manufactured to be of use to the widest possible audience. I’m inverting that, making hyper-specific digital tools for individual people — but still sharing them, for free, on the web, so that others can bend them into their own creations. At the same time, we’re working on a piece of hardware called a Forever Box. It’s made from wood and leather and electricity and a $35 microcomputer. [They’re] artisanal electronics."

Sufi Plug Ins remind us of what hackers have known all along, our machines will control us if we don’t know how to take them apart. Powerful cultural assumptions underpin all of our technology. Software makes those inscriptions harder to detect, but with the proper skills, easier to subvert. Break apart assumptions, play in their absurd instability, and a secret freedom opens through a crevice you can barely see.

Jace performs Friday August 17th as DJ / rupture at Dutty Artz' CHANGE THE MOOD!, Glass Lands 289 Kent Ave, Williamsburg, Brooklyn. 11pm, $10. It’s also his birthday party.

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