Smart is dumb, weird is normal

Seeing things from Kit Clayton's perspective

By KRISTA

 If one were to plot the history of some of today's influential electronic music producers, would we find any sort of correlative pattern? For instance, did most house music producers grow up listening to lots of pop music, with some traditional musical training? Were techno producers more predisposed to alternative or industrial music and generally more rebellious? Were producers of minimal, experimental electronic music highly intelligent and sensitive youths who learned to play the cello at the age of five, joined ska-core bands in their adolescence and then went on to become programmers for important Silicon Valley companies?

 If this theory holds any water at all, the latter category fits Joshua "Kit" Clayton like a glove. The minimal/experimental dub producer was born in a suburb of Chicago where he was cool skater guy in a punk band before going on to study computer science and programming in Connecticut and then moved on out to San Francisco after graduation--"the only logical option," he tells me.

 "I don't feel like I have clarity or vision when I make music," says a humble Clayton from his home in SF. "I think that the whole smart-music/dumb-music thing is a result of cultural biases, an artefact of people just being snobs. I don't know that there is even really that much of a difference. The majority of music is just about people trying to relay an emotional experience, and through that create a space for people to interact in."

 Though the "space" Clayton creates doesn't appear on the outside to be one that people would necessarily interact comfortably in, the strange, gurgling basslines juxtaposed against staticky beats and his refraction of old-school dub elements make, at times, curiously infectious dancefloor killers.

 It's a question of perspective, which is all about where you're coming from. This Friday, Clayton returns to Montreal for the first in a series of MUTEK-inspired evenings entitled Micro*1. "The last time I was there," he remembers, "there was this Francophile festival happening in the same building. All these people were singing these '60s-ish folk songs in unison, in French."

 And how did traditional chanson strike this musical mutationist? "It was pretty weird." :

 With Monolake and Deadbeat at Studio Main on Friday, Feb. 9, 9pm, $20 ($15 students)