The New York radio station WNYC invited various musicians to rework Langston Hughes‘s poem Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz, among them the prolific DJ /rupture (born Jace Clayton), whose “Is It True?” (MP3) takes a recorded version and puts it through voice-tweaking technology that speeds up the spoken word, even as the music veers deep into the downtempo.
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No doubt Rupture — who is a conceptualist remixer at heart — was tempted by the Hughes poem’s investigation of recorded sound:
From the shadows of the quarter
Shouts are whispers carrying
To the fartherest corners sometimes
Of the now known world
Undeciphered and unlettered
Uncodified unparsed
In tongues unanalyzed unechoed
Untaken down on tape—
Not even Folkways captured
By Moe Asch or Alan Lomax
Not yet on safari.
…
And the whispers are unechoed
On the tapes—not even Folkways.
More on the project at wnyc.org, and on Rupture at negrophonic.com.
One Comment
sorry i don’t know about this artist, but thanks for sharing this