kit clayton

Kit Clayton is a basement freak. With little sunlight and musty air, there he spends long days and late nights staring endlessly into the 1024 by 768 pixel grid, toggling the monitor switch back and forth between computers, between operating systems, drifting between work and music. He forgets which of these similar activities he is currently engaged in, as his work is typically constituted by typing line after line of code, and his music is manipulating row after row of digital audio tracks. An embarrassingly digital life, not untypical in our unfortunate age of technological dependence. Somehow sad, but nonetheless beyond the point of judgement. It's all he knows, and rather than being a soulless, sterile life, it is an environment which encourages his emotional expression.



From this hole, he has poured himself into music for labels such as cytrax, delay, drop beat, mille plateaux, parallel, plug research, phthalo, ~scape, and vertical form. From minimal techno to melancholic dub to structured noise, Kit consistently abuses technology, manipulating sounds in otherworldly ways, following an old tradition of dub production. Occasionally he leaves his basement only to find himself at odds with the world around him. Unable to behave himself in public, he unavoidably causes more trouble than intended. This is true in both daily life and public performances. If not behind the turntables, Kit plays his laptop--umbilical cord to his basement womb. Improvisation through soundfile manipulation / recombination, granular synthesis, feedback chains, and other digital noisemaking methods, his live music is a scattered exploration of sound rather than a consistent recreation of his recorded music.



Together with friends dj jasper and dj tang, Kit operates cytrax and delay record labels which continue to spill the messy contents of California techno all over the dance floor. With minimal, noisy, post-processed music more suited for other music geeks than the drug happy club kid, they occupy a strange space within what might appear to be an increasingly conservative world of bang bang techno. And causing even more trouble, Kit and Sue Costabile operate orthlorng musork, a label which seeks to be defined only in its deviance to musical norms. An outlet for marginalized music, it doesn't aim for continuity, but rather a divergent path of sounds and structures unwelcome in the status quo. Busy little bee, kit also works as a computer programmer for cycling '74, the company responsible for max/msp, a flexible environment for custom midi and dsp applications.