Solar Life Raft

Album Review

A mix to file right alongside 2008's Uproot (and not just because it's also from DJ/rupture), Solar Life Raft finds Jace Clayton's DJ/rupture and Matt Shadetek doing what they've done better than any other, at least in America: find the overlap between dubstep and the avant-garde. Granted, individual moments of brilliance may be hard to pick out from the musical morass: warped, mutating effects with straining sub-bass and the lurching flow of a dubstep track, plus various chatters, singers, and poets briefly surfacing and straining to escape all the post-production they've obviously been subjected to. Eventually, highlights emerge, including frequent links to the avant-garde: a spoken-word piece of poet Caroline Bergvall's hypnotic index of animals (titled "More Pets"), Nico Muhly's "Mothertongue" (a haunted track of Steve Reich-style vocal-sample minimalism), and a very short excerpt from Luc Ferrari. Both DJ/rupture and Matt Shadetek contribute a few productions or remixes themselves, alongside friends like Timeblind and Jahdan Blakkamoore.