Nettle

El Resplandor: The Shining In Dubai

Label: Sub Rosa Country: Belgium

"Nettle is a band project led by DJ Rupture. For this album, Nettle imagined a remake of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining set in a luxury hotel in Dubai, U.A.E. El Resplandor: The Shining In Dubai is their soundtrack for that nonexistent film.

Cello, violin, guembri, guitar, and voice combine with digital processing to create a complex soundworld whose acoustic and electronic elements are in intimate dialog. Produced by arranged by Rupture, El Resplandor offers vivid, haunting pieces that draw on the band's various backgrounds in North African folksong, experimental electronics, contemporary classical, and free improvisation.

The album features photographs by acclaimed Emirati artist Lamya Gargash, who was the U.A.E.'s featured artist for the 2009 Venice Biennale, and liner notes by architecture writer Geoff Manaugh (BLDGBLOG). This October the band will release a free set of audio software tools called Sufi Plug Ins (written in Max/MSP) that they built specifically for live performance.

Nettle began as a DJ Rupture's duo with Moroccan violinist Abdelhak Rahal and has since evolved into a five-piece. They have performed at Spain's SONAR festival, Rome's Maxxi Museum of 21st Century Art, and at Morocco's Cinematheque de Tanger, and have toured the UK and Belgium with Nass El Ghiwane.Nettle's work foregrounds issues of friction, translation, and displacement as necessary counter-narratives to the standard paradigms of 'cross-cultural exchange' and metaphors of mixing or hybridity.

Jace Clayton is an interdisciplinary artist living in Brooklyn. Performing as DJ /rupture, Clayton has toured internationally, DJ'ed in a band with Norah Jones, done two John Peel Sessions, and was turntable soloist with the 80-member Barcelona Symphony Orchestra.Recent collaborators include guitarist Andy Moor (The Ex) and filmmaker Jem Cohen. He has released several critically acclaimed albums and mix CDs, starting with 2001's influential & groundbreaking live mix CD, Gold Teeth Thief. Clayton maintains a busy international schedule performing in clubs around the world as well as venues such as The Whitney Museum, MoMA's PS1, The Apollo Theater, and the Pitchfork Festival. His albumUproot was named one of the 10 Best Albums of 2008 by Pitchfork. He maintains a blog, Mudd Up!, and hosts a weekly radio show on WFMU, which is re-broadcast on several European stations."-Sub Rosa