“I interpret the open-ended, irreverent nature of Julius Eastman’s legacy as a call to conversation,” explains Jace Clayton, whom some may know as the globetrotting DJ /rupture. “Reverence can be a form of forgetting.” Clayton is no stranger to irreverence himself; in fact, he’s built a career around it, ripping unheard and forgotten-about sounds from their original context and sonically re-imagining them while retaining a core of human warmth at the heart of this deconstructive process.
On his new album, The Julius Eastman Memory Depot (out March 26th on New Amsterdam Records and the first ever to be released under his own name), Clayton again brings his sense of compassion, wide-eyed exploration, and razor-sharp intellect to the table, but instead of using a variety of sources for inspiration, for the first time, Clayton has chosen a single, if multivalent, subject for his artistic dissection: the life–including music–of gay African-American composer Julius Eastman.
