Metropolis in dub
Kit Clayton constructs new sonic architecture in San Francisco.
By Tomas Palermo
 JOSHUA "Kit" Clayton creates experimental techno with dub sensibilities, releasing material for domestic labels including Plug Research, Drop Beat, and Cytrax. In a short span of time he's also attracted major European interest, earning a lengthy German tour and a release on electronic minimalist Stefan Betke's label ~Scape. Clayton's live performances (done off laptop) with artists like Cologne's Monolake and at the Snaus performance art "happenings" have solidified his prominence in the (re)emerging West Coast experimental techno underground. Along with fellow saboteurs such as Twerk, Sutekh, OST, and User, Clayton is shaping a new sound in electronic music and dissolving techno's rigid conventions in the process.
Part one: Shalimar
It's 5:45 p.m. on Sunday. I'm riding an inbound 38 Geary bus en route to meet Clayton for a meal downtown at his favorite Pakistani restaurant, Shalimar. Owing to the elongated nature of the mammoth transport vehicle I'm on and the ruddy condition of Geary east of Masonic, my ride consists of a series of pothole crashes, lurching advances, impatient curbward swerves to fetch soaking riders, and grumbling engine vibrations that rattle my seat. By comparison, 25-year-old Clayton's music is a smooth ride of glistening-wet dub circuitry, emanating from a music scene in which lesser artists offer clumsy techno static and gear-grinding glitches. The bus bumps and grinds its way down Cathedral Hill, eventually screeching to a stop at O'Farrell and Jones, where I make my exit, relieved, shivering from the memories of the many airborne viruses I'd contracted from riding the 38.
Shalimar is one of several small, family-run Pakistani restaurants in the Tenderloin that feature a simple ambience: faux wood tables, plastic chairs, order-at-the-counter dining, and open-view kitchens brimming with pungent pots gurgling spicy curries and grills where tender kabobs sizzle. In the three years (after moving from Chicago) that Clayton has been in San Francisco, he's explored its remote crevices and culinary underbelly; likewise, his music traverses an alien territory of finely stitched electronic fragments. I've arranged to meet Clayton over dinner to discuss his much lauded late-'99 release Nek Sanalet, on ~Scape, and get the scoop on his (and partner Sue Costabile's) newly birthed Orthlorng Musork imprint. An hour passes and Clayton doesn't show.
Instead, much later in cyberspace, we re-create the conversation that was supposed to happen over steaming plates of nan and lentils. Being a veteran listener of Clayton's music but not his menu suggestions, I inquire about his Shalimar preferences.
Main dish? "Bengen Bhujia veggies/onions) – mind blowing eggplant, the best, Seekh kabab – a really tasty ground meat and spice skewer for only $2.00, plain Naan – the fancy stuff is just a waste of money."
And what about the other tempting items on display, for instance, Mili Juli Sabzi (sautéed veggies/tomatoes)? "Pretty good." Kabli Chana (garbanzos)? "OK, but not mind blowing." Palak Aloo Methi (spinach and potatoes)? "Awesome, my second favorite vegetable dish."
Our Internet exchange is filled with other helpful dining details but shifts quickly to a more common subject, music and Clayton's role in the emerging West Coast experimental techno underground.
In the interim between my solitary dinner and the push-button conversation, I am left to wander the dampened streets of downtown San Francisco and reflect on the translucent nature of (as one reviewer classified it) Clayton's "modern city dub." As I travel east down O'Farrell toward Union Square, the dub metropolis becomes apparent: with my umbrella hovering overhead, acting as a sound funnel, I hear a myriad of noises small and large, up close and distant, saturated in the drone of car tires on wet pavement. By Saks Fifth Avenue on Post Street a metal gas main covering flutters against the sparkled sidewalk, its lid dancing in blasts of steam rising from underground heating ducts. The grate's chimes and clicks are an eerie analog to Clayton's otherworldly bits of metallic reverb heard on his recordings both as Kit Clayton and as Mimic and the Model.
Part two: Repetition and nonsense
Although he has recorded sporadically for underground labels such as Parallel, Delay, and Organized Noise over the past several years, Clayton began drawing serious attention with the release of 1999's Repetition and Nonsense, on Emeryville's Drop Beat. The title of the mini-album alone is an insight into Clayton's awareness about and defiance of the norms held by the dance music community.
"It's a direct description of the music," Clayton says. "I happen to like repetitive and 'random' music and end up making a lot of it. I guess it's a bit of a stab at those who critique music like this for being boring due to its repetition or, conversely, lack of structure."
The up-front rhythms of certain songs on Repetition are not typical of his more recent minimalist-dub output. Clayton's roots as a techno club DJ and early recordings for California's Cytrax label seemed to be the blueprint.
"Depends on one's definition of 'techno' I guess," he says. "I'm biased, but I see all of my music as techno in some sense. But yes, I was maybe focusing more on music that fit in with what people call 'deejayable.' "
Hints of Clayton's more obvious dub work are heard on the track "M-Shape," which has a definite "steppers" or "rockers" militant, 4/4 reggae tempo. The combination of the song's steady beats, low-end bass, and solemn chords creates a potent, sound system-worthy collage. It brings up the question of exactly how much exposure to dub Clayton had absorbed by this point. "Not tons, but definitely enough that it had a clear impact on my music," he says.
The pitch of many of Clayton's songs is minor or bluesy sounding, similar to a lot of late-'70s Jamaican dub.
"Well, almost everything I make is in some minor key," he says. "This is true of most techno also. I didn't pick it up from dub, but it's probably why I enjoy reggae from that period. I guess I personally resonate a bit more with melancholic or slightly darker music, rather than 'feel good' music."
To that end Clayton and architecture major Costibile founded Orthlorng Musork, a label dedicated to cacophony. After I heard a preview of the label's mangled hip-hop debut by Chris Sattinger (a.k.a. Timeblind), it was clear that it was not going to be a polite affair. In Clayton's words, the direction of the imprint is toward "fucked up music. No genre in particular, just sound/music that is somehow deviant and exciting to our ears."
Part three: New languages
My walk through the city continues. I head south down Kearny to Market, soaking up more occurrences of city-generated dub effects along the way. On Market, in the crisp wind of a deserted brick walkway, under the eaves of a majestic building, the raindrops descending from the embroidered marble and limestone facades three stories above strike the sidewalk in faint splashes and patters, enveloped in cool, resonant tones. The nuances of Clayton's music say as much as the songs themselves. His use of negative space and layered echoes, overlapping at various rates, form a sound subtle on the surface and complex within.
Nek Sanalet was a change of direction from Clayton's Drop Beat sound. Gone were most of the "traditional" dance-floor techno beats, replaced with more indefinite, moody structures.
"It's not that different, is it?" Clayton exclaims when pressed on the shift. "There's certainly more of a consistently dub feel I guess. Most of it was made around the same time as the Drop Beat release."
Again, the album's name provides a window to Clayton's thought process. Many of the song titles are not recognizable English but possibly like an Inuit or Central Asian dialect.
"Well this is just true for the ~Scape release, where all the titles are from the language of the Cuna Indians," he says. "After the first Mimic and the Model release, John Friend from Open Mind record store loaned me a book called Mimesis and Alterity which, as its title suggests, talks about mimicry and the converse – self-differentiation. The Mimic and the Model is about relationships of form – between sound and visual, visual and itself, sound and itself. I am interested in manipulations of sound paired against the original in some way. In my eyes, this is a defining characteristic of dub. The Cuna have this belief in a parallel spirit world where everything in the physical world has a ghost double. So I use this as a metaphor for dub production."
But it's still undeniably techno music. Techno taken a step forward. To accomplish the task, Clayton has turned to many new and untried software programs to aid his explorations. He notes the pros and cons to this technique:
"Most of my production is done on my desktop machine, and I use the laptop for live gigs. However, recently I've worked on tracks that are all post-processing, done entirely on a laptop. The limit is only the source material, the software, and one's ability to make creative use of them. I've been enjoying forcing myself to do things that don't make use of me banging on a keyboard or turning knobs. It makes me do things differently than if I just sit down and start jamming."
In present times San Francisco is a paradox of a technological epicenter that is also gentrified and ambivalent/antagonistic toward art. In creating music from software applications while having to survive the city's day-to-day economic pressures, I think, surely Clayton's music would suffer from the strain of this rift.
"I dislike all of this 'goldrush' yuppoid crap," he says, "but to be honest I think that there's a pretty active arts community in S.F. despite the increase in commercialism. Maybe on a smaller level than some places, but people are generally open to and interested in deviant art here."
Part four: A city aesthetic
The final portal where I sample the urban resonance: Powell Muni station, in the Stockton and Ellis entrance hallway. Here the dub analogies are most striking – the dub of metronome footsteps tapping out a perfect midtempo gait, the squeal of shoe rubber on waxed floors echoing off extended walls, the elevator's bell ringing, the doors of the outbound N Judah clasping open and exhaling shut. Here is to be found a metaphor for the multilayered sound structures and muted melodic tones evident on Clayton's albums.
Cities do play a role in shaping Clayton's artistic ideas; so does the contrast between the city and his rural upbringing. "My father lives in the country in Virginia where I've spent some time," he says. "The only other city besides San Francisco I've lived in for any long period of time was the suburbs of Chicago where I grew up." In terms of a city's effect, he says, "The best part about cities for me is that there are just so many people together festering. This leads to some interesting results."
Other recent recordings, such as his contribution to Mille Plateaux's Clicks and Cuts, have shown Kit's more minimalist manifestations. "['Loads early like normal'] focuses on heavy post-processing – warped treatment of minimal organ-like stuff," he says.
Clayton is familiar with minimalism's history and pioneers and knows his own tastes ("more Reich and Riley than Glass"), but he also loves the more challenging works by contemporaries, citing favorites such as Vladislav Delay, Jurgen Paape, Autopoieses, Achim Wollscheid, SND, Farben, and music on the labels Klang, Playhouse, Perlon, and Kompakt.
With Clayton's unusually forward-thinking state of mind, it would seem difficult for him to relate to San Francisco's other personality, that of a more "laid back" community where the dub's echo might decay more rapidly.
"I don't know," he says. "I relate really well with my basement where I spend virtually all of my time. I wouldn't say I relate any better to any other place. There are a lot of people here interested in and producing music that I like, so that's positive. I have lots of good friends here. For these reasons I love it here."
Forthcoming by Kit Clayton is an EP for U.K.-based Vertical Form, a CD on New York's Carpark, and a new EP for Cytrax.
PHOTO: SUE COSTABILE
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