The same goes for his recordings. Clayton’s 2001 breakout mix, Gold Teeth Thief, opens with Missy Elliott’s “Get Ur Freak On,” a staple of commercial radio that epitomized American hip-hop’s fascination at the time with “oriental” sounds – in this case an oversimplified version of bhangra rhythm, a centuries-old Indian musical tradition. Forty-one tracks and a little over an hour later, if the listener were to draw lines on a map of what had just been heard, there wouldn’t be a continent untouched. Not to mention the occasional jagged line where the mix is punctuated by breakcore, an abrasive, deconstructive approach to certain electronic music forms popular in the ’90s or frequent returns to the United States where instantly recognizable songs like MC Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This” are put through a sonic blender. Flawlessly composed on three turntables, the music is jarring only when intended to be. The transitions flow as seamlessly as if the flights across the musical diaspora were all first class, especially impressive given the frequent tempo shifts, as Clayton deftly maneuvers between genres.

Some critics argue that there’s an ideological goal in Clayton’s global musical leaps. “Like DJ Spooky, DJ /rupture is spelling out a political thesis,” declares Charles Spano of the All Music Guide in his review of Minesweeper Suite (Tigerbeat6, 2003). DJ Spooky has earned the activist title, with projects like Rebirth of a Nation, a live remix of D.W. Griffith’s apology for segregation. Clayton, on the other hand, opines, “Political music is propaganda and propaganda is annoying.”

In the case of Gold Teeth Thief, it was something he “did just for friends.” Despite its humble origins, critics took notice. Clayton explains, “I put it on the internet so I didn’t have to mail it to everybody and a few months later it was written up in VIBE and The Wire, with shops calling me trying to order copies, interviews.” Like any breakout success, of course, Gold Teeth Thief was by no means a stroke of luck. “In order to be a decent DJ or musician, you have to learn the craft itself,” he proffers.

His CV speaks for itself in that regard. A co-founder of the Toneburst collective, which hosted experimental audio-visual events around Boston from 1996 to 2001, Clayton has a long history with genres of electronic music centered around break beats, or looped samples of the percussive interludes that occur partway through funk, soul, and disco songs. As Keith Fullerton Whitman (a.k.a. Hrvatski), a fellow member of Toneburst, commented in a November 2002 feature for Pitchfork Media, “Time always catches up with the dedicated. Ten years of mixing hyper, cut-up, distorted Amen break tracks [the Amen break, the most popular in break beat genres, samples The Winstons’ 1969 song “Amen Brother”] with every possible phylum of underground music has yielded a single mix CD, as dense and calculated as the best plunderphonic etude.”

Whitman’s coinage on the term “plunder” is just as tongue-in-cheek as the use of “thief” in the mix’s title. As Clayton states emphatically, “I only use music I understand.” When the word “borrow” was brought up in interview, Clayton’s repartee was brisk: “You’re implying that the non-Western material I use is somehow exterior to me, and that I can use it but not ‘own’ it, another loaded term – why import ideas of ownership into a discussion of utility and influence in music?”

To that end, Clayton’s latest musical project, the live act Nettle, stems from his engagement with the Moroccan music he has encountered while living in Barcelona. Of course, Clayton is not attempting some kind of pale imitation. He explains, “There is no form in question. That’s where Nettle begins. How do we give form to reflect our current realities, displaced and out-of-place and overlapping? Nettle is a trio (a Moroccan man, a Scottish woman, and myself, all living as legal foreigners in Spain). What we do is create a shared musical space were we all feel equally competent and comfortable. Naturally, the resulting sound is hybrid, and rooted; Nettle reflects the reality of 3 musicians, all expatriates, living in a foreign country, communicating to each other in a second-language, and finding musical harmonies, enlargening the common ground, navigating our musical discord. It is a music of ‘making-do’ – immigrants always need to improvise.”

That Nettle should be a unique amalgamation and reinterpretation comes as no surprise in light of Clayton’s attitude toward the non-Western musical forms that he brings into the conversation. “The last thing I want to see,” he asserts, “is living musical traditions treated by outsiders as if they were museum pieces, stuffed and mounted and dusty and inert. One respects musical ideas and thoughts by thinking them anew and transforming them.” As such, the whirlwind recombination of a DJ /rupture mix and his performances with Nettle are two sides of the same coin. Firm in principle, he elaborates, “A basic concept of both my work as Rupture and as part of Nettle is that to simplify and work with a single genre or tradition would be dishonest; it’s a fight to stay plural, especially knowing that if I simplified my approach I’d become much more attractive to more lucrative labels.”

This urge for plurality best summarizes Clayton’s mission. Some politics are inevitable, because, as he readily admits, “Cross-cultural encounters and exchanges are almost never carried out on equal footing.” But if there’s an agenda, it’s nothing more than keeping the multitudes of living music alive. It just so happens that those multitudes come from “traditionally segregated sources, American, Arabic, African, Jamaican, European.” One might be tempted to call Clayton a crafter of “world music” if the term hadn’t already been tainted by its application to Western releases of foreign but ultimately unchallenging music. Placing a selection from Paul Simon’s Graceland at the end of Gold Teeth Thief meant no disrespect to the black South African musicians featured on it, but it did signify a “world music” far more meaningful than one that champions the comfortably popular liberal cause du jour, as Apartheid was in the ’80s.

Besides, part of Clayton’s plurality involves rejecting any labels more deterministic than his own perfectly chosen term: rupture, whether created by rapid-fire style shifts or burst of dissonance. On the breakcore barrages he periodically winds through his mixes, he comments, “Sometimes you need the noise. To shatter the narcotic sense of complacency. To reinforce the raw fact of alternatives, of possibilities beyond the established categories.” Unsurprisingly, he’s quick to chastise journalists whose inclination is to tease out every genre, as if he could be reduced to the sum of his parts. “Like cooking,” he analogizes, “instead of describing the dishes I prepare, they attempt to list ingredients.”

In turn he offers his own lyrical description: “The world my mixes reflect is hot, polyglot, filled with both conflict and love. For me and many others, it's quite natural: this is where and how we live.” Conflict, as in “The only good cop is a dead cop / Police brutality must come to a stop” from rap duo Dead Prez in one of the few moments on Gold Teeth Thief where the music fades out underneath. Love, as in Elizabeth Alexander’s poem “Overture: Watermelon City,” a paean to the rhythm and rage of West Philadelphia that opens Special Gunpowder (Tigerbeat6, 2004), his first fully licensed release (not that copyright infringement was ever any deterrent).

Clayton continues,