Session Transcript:
Deadbeat
Red Bull Music Academy, Melbourne 2006

The video stream for this lecture can be watched here.

Deadbeat: the word’s connotations are all about idleness, exhaustion and misfortune. But it’s also the chosen moniker of one of the most active individuals in electronic music, Scott Montieth, who talks here about his influences growing up in Canada under the wing of a friend’s older brother. He jumps from Public Enemy to the avantgarde industrial merchants Skinny Puppy. But perhaps his biggest influence is fellow Ontarian, Richie Hawtin, who he used to follow from gig to gig as a raved-up teenager. He also gets all misty-eyed for the ambient rooms of the '90s and discusses the pendulum swing between poppiness and abstraction.

RBMA: »Let’s give the man a big hand here (applause). Speaking in tongues, which brings us to the background, how does the son of a preacher man and reiki teacher end up listening to Skinny Puppy?«

Deadbeat: »To begin with, when I was quite young I had a friend whose older brother was – this is something that happens with a lot of people – fairly formative in deciding what was cool for us. He initially was the person who infleunced me to buy what was the first cassette I ever bought, which was Public Enemy, and then later on he got into Psychic TV and Throbbing Gristle, and so did I as a result of that, because we thought he was cool.«

RBMA: »Bigger brother decided what was cool.«

Deadbeat: »Yeah, totally. My parents, like a lot of people from that part of the country, were hippies. So I grew up listening to a lot of Bob Dylan and Simon & Garfunkel, that kind of thing. Getting the initial access to this whole new world of music was really exciting.«

RBMA: »How did you learn to trust a hippie?«

Deadbeat: »(laughs) When you grow up with them they’re lovable folks.«

RBMA: »It’s kind of funny, with folk music being so beautiful but as a teenager you rebel against it, but sooner or later you end up finding out that all the stuff that you subconsciously listened to as a kid wasn’t that bad in the first place.«

Deadbeat: »Totally, not just with music but with any influence in your life. Though particularly with music, I find that things tend to go full circle. You often find yourself arriving back in places where you were before, but in a slightly different context.«

RBMA: »So on paper Chuck D and Trent Reznor are about that far away (stretches arms), but when you’re about 13 that doesn’t really matter.«

Deadbeat: »No, sonically the end result is very different, but if you compare a lot of the production methods of people like Nivek Ogre and the Skinny Puppy guys and Al Jourgensen from Ministry and Trent Reznor were using in comparison to Keith and Hank Shocklee's, who were doing all the Public Enemy stuff, the methodology and the tools were the same even if it’s producing a lot of different results. I think that’s something that carries through today in a big, big way.«

RBMA: »You’ve spent most of the night deciding what would be the five tracks that shaped your life so it would be a shame if we didn’t start with at least one of them.«

Deadbeat: »The first one is a track by Public Enemy and it’s the first track – I was trying to remember last night which track was the first to really mark the time that I first heard sample-based production - and this is from It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back and it’s called Louder Than A Bomb.«

(music: Public Enemy - Louder Than A Bomb)

»I heard that probably for the first time when I was 11, 12 and it really, really marked me, just the crowd samples which a friend of mine, after doing some research, was pretty certain were sampled from The Beatles playing on Ed Sullivan. They were being used as a percussive element and that really just flipped my mind, that you could use what is essentially noise, non-musical sounds, in a musical context.«

RBMA: »What else is different to you when you listen to it now than your feelings as a teenager, because obviously those are your formative years that shape the way you think about music for many years to come?«

Deadbeat: »I read in Future Music Magazine in the UK there was an interview with Chuck D talking about some of the production methods used for My Uzi Weighs A Ton on A Nation Of Millions. The earliest productions the Shocklees were doing, they were doing pause-button mixtapes, where they were taking a sample off a record, recording it to the tape, pausing the tape, going back and recording the sample again and putting these things together in this very time consuming way. While I was amazed at the sheer amount of time and dedication it would take, it also struck me how on a very low-tech level it was similar to a lot of the loop-based productions that’s going on now.«

RBMA: »Low-tech is one thing but a lot of us were a little bit stoked when Mr Shocklee told us that a lot of the sonic boom was just taken from the SP-1200 and hitting it up through a Neve desk. So what are we going to do now, raid Sony studios and play it back? It’s not going to happen. But what are the strategies, what can you learn from that?«

Deadbeat: »Those early recording methods are great examples that the tools are really secondary. If you’re passionate about what you’re doing, then it’s really about making the most of whatever you got. I’ve heard recordings by extreme noise artists that are just a guitar distortion pedal and them screaming their brains out into a microphone that are incredibly visceral and powerful recordings. It’s really just about making the most of what you’ve got at hand.«

RBMA: »What kind of cultural significance did Public Enemy have where you grew up? First it was all about New York for those guys, then they moved throughout the tri-state area, but you were the first foreign market, I guess.«

Deadbeat: »Yeah, absolutely. I think generally in North America, you could argue there were people before them like Last Poets who had an overtly political message, but I think Public Enemy were the first act that crossed over into the mainstream because the message was so overt and for 12, 13-year-olds, like myself at the time, yeah, that was fist-in-the-air bad boy music that was really loud and pissed your parents off.«

RBMA: »But apart from the pissing your parents off bit, over in Germany we had all these American servicemen and it was basically the music they listened to, which is kind of interesting in itself – there they are serving the man, as Chuck D would put it, and at the same time they were listening to all these controversial messages. You’d see 6.000 of them watching a show just 20 minutes away from all the nuclear warheads. It’s really twisted.«

Deadbeat: »Yeah, the irony in that is pretty striking.«

RBMA: »But how foreign is that from the Canadian experience?«

Deadbeat: »I certainly wouldn’t want to speak for the African-American experience in the US; but there’s all this talk of securing the border between the States and Canada these days, but in terms of cultural exchange it’s a very grey area. Obviously, you get a lot of US influence in Canadian culture, in different music cultures and various arts there’s a lot of Canadian influence in American culture.«

RBMA: »You were born in Ontario, which is pretty close to Detroit.«

Deadbeat: »Toronto could be essentially be the state that never was. Even geographically it dips into the Unites States. Culturally speaking, because of the French culture and the vast cultural diversity of Montréal, you have a very different experience there than you do in the rest of Canada. But politically speaking Canada has tended to be more socialist, left-leaning than the US, but just from the signs you see in the street, the cultural climate in general, there’s a lot of American influence. You’d be hard pushed to find a specifically Canadian culture, beyond maple syrup and beavers.«

RBMA: »There was always a strong exchange between Ontario and Michigan.«

Deadbeat: »In the early to mid-'90s my experience was very similar to a lot of people; wearing pants that were way too big and spending a lot of time travelling around, following people like Richie Hawtin and generally being a degenerate raver.«

RBMA: »He was a fellow Canuck as well.«

Deadbeat: »Yes, who was a Canuck and is now a Berliner, or doing his best to be.«

RBMA: »Do you feel like he betrayed your home?«

Deadbeat: »Absolutely not.«

RBMA: »Another track maybe.«

Deadbeat: »With him in mind - there was one thing I was going to play, but as we’ve brought him up - there’s a track called Plasticity from the first Plastikman album, which was the first time I became aware of the power of less being more.«

(music: Plastikman – Plasticity)

»It’s all about working different sounds to the absolute max. (comments over music) The thing about this track is, it’s an 808, a reverb unit and a 303. If any of us really wanted to, we could go to the studio upstairs – it has all this gear – and make this track fresh. It was an incredibly influential experience for me and a lot of people around the Midwest in Canada. Richie had an outstanding influence to the point that, probably about ‘94/95, there was a group of people, of which I was one, known as Hawtheads who were following him around wherever he was doing the Plastikman live shows or DJing, there would always be this sea of bald, scrawny white boys in front of the speaker.«

RBMA: »Did you have glassless frames to fit in as well?«

Deadbeat: »Fortunately, I never had to wear glasses but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were some who didn’t have to, but wore them anyway.«

RBMA: »There were all these techno crusaders earlier who were all about faceless music, let the music speak for itself. Now, all of a sudden you have one of the pioneers of this genre being elevated to this cult figure. It’s like: ”Hang on!“«

Deadbeat: »That was a really late development with the whole Plastikman guise. The production handles that he used, Richie subscribed to the same Mad Mike Banks philosophy of facelessness. That not only permeated the Midwest of Canada but it made it over to Germany as well, the whole connection between the Underground Resistance guys and Basic Channel that occurred.«

RBMA: »When you speak of the Midwest there’s this history of everything from MC5 and The Stooges to Motown, but why was industrial so big there?«

Deadbeat: »I think it’s very easy when you’re talking about poor working class towns like Detroit and Chicago, or whether you’re talking about a place like Kingston, Jamaica, out of poverty and suffering you tend to get very powerful music. The flip side of that is the whole industrial scene, both in the UK and the States, can almost be seen as a direct reflection of the physical environment of factories and warehouses and taking things, not only from the perspective of social circumstance, but also reflecting on this in a very literal aesthetic way. And also, technologically speaking, finding ways of abusing or using that technology was perhaps one purpose and finding creative ways of pushing that to the extreme.«

RBMA: »Who were the key players for you in that field?«

Deadbeat: »Psychic TV and Throbbing Gristle were the biggest, although they were at their peak before my time, but the guys within that scene who influenced me were Skinny Puppy. That might be because there was a Canadian connection there, guys that went on to be Delerium and Front Line Assembly were evolved in Skinny Puppy. With that in mind…«

RBMA: »That’s the first time I’ve heard Front Line Assembly being mentioned in 15 years.«

Deadbeat: »The other track I picked out last night is a Skinny Puppy track and is a particularly good example of technology being used in an abusive way and pushing it to extremes. It’s a track called Download and in fact it ended up starting an entire new side-project they called Download. This one’s a bit harsh for the morning, I’m sorry.«

(music: Skinny Puppy - Download)

»That’s a bit of a short excerpt – that track’s actually about 14 minutes long. One of the fixtures in the rave scene in Toronto in the mid-'90s, which was really great and I’ve been regretful of it not permeating parties and raves these days, is ambient rooms. The first time I heard this song was in an ambient room at about 6am in a state of some shock. I’ve listened to this song so many times, there are CDs skipping, reel-to-reel tapes being manipulated, just finding really extreme ways of pushing the technology. It really marked me as quite impressive.«

RBMA: »It’s all about listening environments as well. They also did apply the same technologies to club environments in the '80s. How do you feel these days with the art of the album gone, and people just skipping through their iPod and you have a track that lasts 14 minutes?«

Deadbeat: »I think it’s a really interesting growth going on both extremes of the issue. On the one hand with the whole electroclash movement there seemed to grow a turn to a poppier aesthetic, but now the pendulum is turning back to people like Luciano and Ricardo Villalobos playing out with DVD decks and playing mixes that are 20 plus minutes long. You see bands like Grow from Chicago and Tim Hecker and a lot of this really heavy drone-based music coming to the forefront again. I think that’s a natural cycle that happens consistently. In order for things to grow and change it is important for the pendulum to swing back and forth between two scenes.«

RBMA: »Even when the pendulum is in the middle of swinging you still need to have the right environment. When you are in relaxing mode it’s not the couch/armachair kind of thing. Headphone material?«

Deadbeat: »Headphone material, yes. I guess, that’s the interesting thing about tracks like this it’s essentially listening music. You’re definitely not going to be dancing to it, you’re definitely not going to be doing the dishes to it.«

RBMA: »So what is your set up when you do play live?«

Deadbeat: »These days, like a lot of people, I have been using Ableton Live. I spend a lot of time trying to figure out what’s the most effective way for me to do music and thankfully I had the opportunity to work in a couple of different contexts and on a couple of different projects. As well as Deadbeat I also do a project with my friend Steve Beaupré called Crackhaus and also a project called Atlantic Waves with Mr Monolake, Robert Henke. The fun thing with all of those projects is figuring out how to use this instrument in the most effective way.«

RBMA: »To what extent does the crowd matter for live aesthetics and stages and set-up's and interaction and god knows what else?«

Deadbeat: »Certainly, for the solo stuff, because there’s been such a diverse range of environments that I’ve performed in recent years, it’s demanded that I try and find a way of being able to change direction on a dime if need be. You can walk into a place and assume you know what the context will be and what they want to hear, but often people will let you know very, very vocally if you’ve gone in the wrong direction.«

RBMA: »How important is it to let the listener actually see who’s performing the music?«

Deadbeat: »I think that’s totally context-sensitive. There are some situations where being able to see what the performer is doing can add a lot to it. For the last five years, since I’ve been doing a lot more live performance, there’s the argument that sitting around watching somebody who could essentially just be checking their email is not a particularly enthralling performance experience. It really depends on what feels most comfortable to the person and what the venue context is.«

RBMA: »It’s interesting, too, talking about things going full circle, all these new genres coming through but eventually they all get to the point where they go: “Hey, we are real musicians now.” It’s like some king knightening you: “OK, you’re now a musician.” How did that notion of being a musician change for you over the years?«

Deadbeat: »I think it’s interesting generally seeing different band projects who are expanding the concept of musicians - as opposed to having bass, drums, guitar and keyboard player - they’ll have bass, drums, turntables and laptop.«

RBMA: »You’re talking about Linkin Park having some dude there, so it looks cool?«

Deadbeat: »Yeah, totally. Even these laptop orchestras, like Mimeo is a great example of that. What were we talking about again (laughs)?«

RBMA: »We’re just wondering how, for you, the notion of musicianship changed and whether it’s important to be considered a musician or whether it’s just like: “Hey, I’m fine with what I am.” But what are you?«

Deadbeat: »I’m fine with being a slightly more technologically endowed DJ. Certainly, with my solo stuff I’ve done a lot of work in the last couple of years trying to make this set up with the laptop and this controller be as seamless and as mindless as possible. I know what every single control does and I don’t have to think about what will happen if I do something.«

RBMA: »How important is it for you to minimise yourself and what it is you’re using instead of trying out 800 different decades of technology?«

Deadbeat: »I’m totally up for using whatever’s available, but in terms of travelling, keeping things compact and minimised is really important.«

RBMA: »Another influence for you might be the whole dub world. Now, the thing that people learned about dub is the art of leaving things out, space in the music.«

Deadbeat: »Certainly, and in many ways, going to what we’ve just been talking about, using the concept of the computer as an instrument and that whole dub aesthetic that started in the late '60s, was a microcosm of that, using the studio as an instrument. Obviously, with the initial players like King Tubby and Lee Perry. For me personally, I arrived at them backwards, spending a lot of time in the rave scene and then, at some point in the mid-'90s, having heard a lot of Basic Channel and that Berlin techno-dub sound, that was my first contact with that aesthetic. That’s the next of the five songs that changed my life, this is Carrier by Rhythm & Sound.«

(music: Rhythm & Sound – Carrier)

»Obviously, the guys behind Basic Channel and Rhythm & Sound have been massively influential, not just on me, but in inventing a subgenre all by themselves. The thing that struck me about it in comparison to a lot of techno stuff at that time was how incredibly organic and raw it was. All of the tracks were just slathered in tape hiss, tons of ground hum, just the rawest, rawest music I’d ever heard, a lot of crackles. Comparing it to a lot of older dub stuff, it has all of those key elements, all the reverbs, delays, the improvisational tweaking of very few elements and pushing that to the maximum, but also this incredibly very modern aesthetic.«

RBMA: »The other interesting thing is it taught a whole generation, which was brought up on technology and weird preconceptions of what reggae and dub would mean, to look past the crustified edge of it and dig deeper. People like Mark Ernestus would be avid collectors of incredible technological-savvy Jamaican music from the mid-'80s. What were the technologies apart from the tape hiss and so on that were really important in there? You said earlier, using the studio as an instrument. But, a), that’s not particularly performance friendly, and b), what would that look like in reality?«

Deadbeat: »From a hardware perspective, actively making changes to the EQ settings, manipulating delays and reverbs in real time. Just literally having something that’s represented well with the software tools people use these days to perform - Ableton being an excellent example of that - because essentially you’ve got your sound sources in clips or whatever various pieces of audio, which can function as snippets of tape or whatever. You’ve got your mixer, which with your box here you can have physical control over, and you’ve got your effects that you can manipulate. And it obviously makes the reality of working in a dub context a whole lot easier than hauling out a 64 channel desk and effects.«

RBMA: »One of the other interesting aspects about them was how you take your influences and pay tribute without turning it into something old. Anyone who has been walking up Stewart Street has seen thousands of posters of Guns ‘N’ Roses and Kiss tribute bands, but they’re just going beyond the cover version.«

Deadbeat: »That’s always been a big issue for me. Anybody working in the electronic music genre, with very rare exception, is essentially working within black music traditions and regardless of what your influence is, it’s really important to try and find ways of respecting where that’s come from and redefining it for yourself without it just being some sort of empty appropriation, or stealing things straight up. You need to mould that into your context and try to find ways of pushing things into something new.«

RBMA: »Have you ever been to Jamaica?«

Deadbeat: »No.«

RBMA: »Are you planning to go?«

Deadbeat: »Absolutely, for sure. There’s a friend of mine, Moss, that I’ve been doing reggae nights with in Montreal for a couple of years now and he’s an avid collector, goes down there a couple of times a year to pick up records.«

RBMA: »So I guess, you’ve got a good picture of the reality there already.«

Deadbeat: »Absolutely.«

RBMA: »How do you find ways of using influences from a foreign culture and incorporating them without ripping them off?«

Deadbeat: »Technologically speaking we’ve got the power to do pretty much anything right now, right inside the box. With that in mind I think it’s become easier to shape sounds to reach a point that it really feels like yours. That’s by no means an easy process to go through. Sometimes it takes five minutes, sometimes it takes a lot longer.«

RBMA: »What’s the significance of it being yours? Is this some cultural thing, ego thing? A marketing thing, maybe, that’s setting you apart from the crowd?«

Deadbeat: »I’m not really sure, but I’m human, there’s definitely got to be some kind of ego there. But, for me it’s important not to be wearing the influences completely on your sleeve so that it’s just another modern rehash of something that’s been done before. It’s about trying to find something new and fresh, beyond on how the rest of the world is going to receive it. If I end up making something that’s just biting something that’s been done before, then the creative experience isn’t as fulfilling and I’m not going to walk in the studio everyday feeling like I’ve done what I needed to do.«

RBMA: »How do you apply quality control management before you release something new to the world?«

Deadbeat: »Well, that brings up something that’s really essentially important and that’s the idea of community. Although we haven’t had the chance to do it quite as much in recent months, in Montreal within my circle of friends we used to run an event called Demolition, where you’d bring in whatever you’d done, whether it was one track or two tracks or whatever, and sit down with your nearest and dearest and have a no-holds-barred critical session. And at the worst of times it could definitely get ugly. Putting something on and someone saying: “Your kick couldn’t get itself out of a wet paper bag, your synth melodies are cheesy, your bass is muddy, I like your hi-hats.” Not to suggest there needs to be that hardcore criticism to get things done but it’s incredibly important to have a community of people whom you trust around you who tell it to you straight for you to grow creatively.«

RBMA: »How do you physically keep up a community where criticism is allowed when almost anyone known to man is busily exchanging very charming and pleasingly affirmative MySpace messages and can’t even be bothered to get out of the house anymore?«

Deadbeat: »We’ve been really fortunate in Montreal in that in the last seven years there’s been a very tight community of producers and DJs, hangers-on, involved in the Mutek Festival. From the very beginning it’s been a very family-oriented, organically evolving organisation both in terms of the people involved in it, and in terms of the events themselves, whether you’re talking about the festival that happens every June or the micro Mutek events that are going on. Or the Demolition events that people associated with it have been involved in. Just the feeling that you’re surrounded by people who care about what you do and want to see you succeed and who you want to succeed, whether you’re talking about 50 or 60 who are running the festival every year or five people in your hometown, it’s totally crucial.«

RBMA: »To what extent do you think the place where the music is being done and conceived is determining the actual outcome?«

Deadbeat: »That’s really tough to say these days. With technological mobility that becomes less of a factor, speaking specifically about electronic-based music. In terms of live musicians, obviously we’re also a product of our own environment, but I think that’s a really grey area these days.«

RBMA: »So why don’t you have the feeling or the urge to move to either London or New York or Berlin?«

Deadbeat: »When I moved to Montréal about 11 years ago, there were a lot of people who arrived in the city at the same time with similar backgrounds and motivations that somehow managed to connect and put together what eventually would be the Mutek festival and events related to it. Obviously, different places in the world become nexus points for different creative centres. Berlin is obviously the nexus these days for anyone related to the whole minimal techno aesthetic.«

RBMA: »What are the things you learned while observing various evolving scenes over the years? For people who might live in one place and feel excluded from what’s going on elsewhere in the world, what would encourage those people to go out and build their own?«

Deadbeat: »Some people have told me this is a pessimistic view, but the thing I’ve always found very encouraging is, regardless of where you go in the world, people essentially want the same things and essentially care about the same things. They want to have a context within which to be themselves and get done the things that need to get done. There are scenes that have popped up in the most random places. Again, to go back to the Midwest, to have a place like Milwaukee and Detroit, that’s a perfect example of a totally industrial town with the industry having collapsed, and for that to become a nexus for electronic music is really astounding. I think that if people can manage to find even a handful of people motivated within their own communities to push each other, then scenes can spring up anywhere.«

RBMA: »Then, I guess, it depends on how you measure the success of these developments in the first place, it depends on what you’re after. A working and living environment where you can ultimately do what you artistically want to do?«

Deadbeat: »Absolutely, all the people in this room, we’re talking about creative people or they wouldn’t be making music. Sometimes you need to apply that not just to music but to the community context in which you’re working. I encountered a great example of that in Sydney this past weekend. A guy called Seb Chan, who I guess has been fairly instrumental in developing the scene in Australia, encountered a situation where she had a lot of friends who were getting older and weren’t necessarily wanting to go out to clubs every weekend. They are having kids and didnt necessarily have the oppurtunity to do that, but they were still very passionate music listeners and wanting to know what was going on. They may not have had the time or the money to go out looking for music all the time, so they have this music club dinner where they get together once a week and people bring along the new music they’ve got or Seb suggests some CDs. Different times when people have been in from out of town to do shows, like I did a little live performance demo, and I think that is completely removed from the standard club context, but provides an essential service to that community in that they’re still getting access to music and still having their creative energies being fed by new input.«

RBMA: »With sales as one column of traditional income for musicians being slightly under threat, to which extent do you need to tour to live as an artist these days?«

Deadbeat: »That’s something that comes up in conversations in contexts like this all the time. Whereas previously the idea was that people were touring in order to sell records within a traditional band context, within the electronic community you’re making records to tour. That’s the bread and butter, that’s what pays the rent.«

RBMA: »So why are you still paying rent if you’re touring all the time?«

Deadbeat: »That’s a good question, but for me, even if it’s a completely dishevelled glorified closet, it’s really important to have something I can call home base, even if I’m hardly there. I want somewhere where I can unplug and walk around in pyjamas and slippers.«

RBMA: »So what are the Deadbeat rules for the road?«

Deadbeat: »Rules for the road? I don’t know, I’m still trying to figure those out.«

RBMA: »We’ve heard your influences but we haven’t heard any of your own work. Would you like to give us a demo of that?«

Deadbeat: »Sure, I’ll start with some solo stuff. We were talking about the idea of using the studio as an instrument and the solo stuff I’ve been doing definitely comes from this dub aesthetic. The set up I’ve developed with Ableton Live and this controller is definitely very classic. Mixer and effects, try to play things live as much as possible.«

(music: Deadbeat – unknown / applause)

RBMA: »How do you demo music in 30 seconds that usually takes 12 minutes to build up?«

Deadbeat: »That’s a good question. It’s difficult to condense something that takes a lot longer to organically grow and develop.«

RBMA: »How do you develop ear-catching elements in your compositions when you shy away from the hook line?«

Deadbeat: »Stuff like the track I just played, the more ambient stuff, often starts from reprocessed field recordings or something like that. So as opposed to starting with a rhythm, different rhythms will present themselves from pushing and shoving on different clicks and clacks off a garbage can or a cat walking across some paper. I think that the more haphazard organic layering of building things up and then stripping away the elements that don’t need to be there, I’ve always really enjoyed working that way.«

RBMA: »How do you manage the eye versus ear ratio? Obviously, using an interface live is a lot more demanding to your eyes than, let’s say, Tubby in his shed.«

Deadbeat: »Definitely for the final mix of things, the EQing and compression decisions, I always close the lid and work totally removed. It becomes far, far too easy to say: “OK, this is clipping, this is going over. This is sitting perfectly in zero and I want it to be perfectly zero because I want it as loud as possible.” But a lot of times within the computer it might sound better if your kickdrum is clipping and you can worry about that afterwards. It might be better if, even though you don’t want to lose the bass in your bass, it might be better if you wind up shelving a whole lot of low rumble. It might end up sounding better if you shelve out certain areas on your snare. I think with the visual feedback in terms of performance, programmes like Live and whatever you’re going to use really give you a very clear picture of what’s going on in terms of production decisions. But it’s really important to use your ears, because regardless of whether the frequency analyser says everything’s balanced, if it doesn’t sound good then it doesn’t sound good.«

RBMA: »How do you monitor your stuff then?«

Deadbeat: »With speakers.«

RBMA: »But when you’re on the road, on a bus, or waiting for a plane then you’re not going to have these Genelec's right under your arm.«

Deadbeat: »Sure. This trip is an interesting example of that because I’m supposed to have stuff done for a new album by the end of November and I’ve got some basic ideas but haven’t done much of the tracking for the individual tracks. Thankfully, I was in San Francisco for a week before coming out here with access to a great studio with a Neve desk and PMC’s and every tube compressor you could possibly want. So essentially I just spent the week there getting things tweaked out and sounding good. Now I know I can track things on headphones and not worry about how things are sounding. The initial elements sound good there and I can do the lay out stuff on the headphones, then go back to the studio when it’s done, make sure there aren’t any huge areas.«

RBMA: »Tracking on headphones can be pretty dangerous. They’re your most valuable asset and you can fuck them up pretty easily with headphones and the wrong plug-in.«

Deadbeat: »Not only that, I think it can be physically dangerous to be jacking things through your headphones day in, day out. You’re running the risk of damaging your ears. It can also be dangerous in the way a mix ends up sounding. Depending on the headphones you’re using, you almost always over-compensate one way or the other, you end up with hi-hats that are screaming or the bass way too loud.«

RBMA: »But how do you keep some sort of continuity when you constantly change your monitoring situations?«

Deadbeat: »I think at the end of the day, if you can make something good on the crappiest speakers in your house, you can make it good on the biggest speakers in the world. Obviously, the more systems you play on, the more you learn about the music that’s coming out of your computer. It’s important to play things in as many contexts as possible. I often call my neighbour when it’s done and get him to drive me 'round in his car, there are many people who consider the car the crucial listening spot because if it’s going to sound good there, it’s going to sound good.«

RBMA: »What kind of car are we talking about, like trucks?«

Deadbeat: »He’s got a Maserati, actually, so it’s a fairly comfy listening environment, for sure.«

RBMA: »How does your sound compete with the natural growl of a Maserati?«

Deadbeat: »That’s part of the joy of listening in the car. If the bass drowns out the hum of the engine, then you know you’ve got things right.«

RBMA: »So the basic ingredient is just to find a neighbour with a Maserati and you’re set?«

Deadbeat: »Exactly, that’s all you need.«

RBMA: »Think that’s going to be easy one then. Right, any questions on the issue of finding a neighbour with a Maserati? It is coming, it is coming, all the way around.«

Participant: »(inaudible question)«

Deadbeat: »Future of Jamaican music?«

Participant: »(inaudible question)«

Deadbeat: »Being somebody who’s passionate about everything from mento and ska right up to dancehall now, if there’s anywhere in the world that consistently redefines and reinvents and creates something that’s new and exciting... I can’t really predict what the future will look like, but there’s nowhere in the world I’ve got more confidence will come up with something fresh and new and mind-blowing.«

Participant: »Do you have some special earplug or something? Do you think maybe the way your sound has developed is partly because you’ve lost part of your hearing?«

Deadbeat: »The terrible thing is there’s actually an ear doctor ‘round the corner from my house that makes custom earplugs.«

RBMA: »It’s a pretty good neighbourhood, isn’t it? You’ve got the Maserati, you’ve got the ear doctor.«

Deadbeat: »And I’ve been putting it off forever. It’s not that the music I’m making doesn’t have to do with huge ranges in the spectrum.«

Participant: »(inaudible question)«

Deadbeat: »Yeah, it’s a scary thing to think about, but something that I guess we are all going to have to deal with. Something we all have to be sure about is to take care of our ears in all contexts.«

RBMA: »We should probably play some of the more uptempo stuff as well, maybe that will stimulate more questions. But first our man here.«

Participant: »(inaudible question)«

Deadbeat: »It wasn’t that many tracks afterwards, it was probably in the neighbourhood of ten tracks. The cool thing is, the first track I ever made became the ambient backing stuff for a track that was on the first album a couple of years afterwards.«

Participant: »You are still working on Crackhaus?«

Deadbeat: »Yeah, sure. Steve, who is the other half of Crackhaus, just finished a solo album which came out on Mutek, I think in September, but he has also just had a baby, so things have been on hold. But it’s definitely something we’ll get back on track in a couple of months. It’s the yin to the Deadbeat yan. This is a track on a label started by Steve, myself and Mark Akufen in Montreal called Musique Risquée. This is a 12” we issued two years ago now called Blame Canada.«

(music: Crackhaus - Blame Canada! / applause)

RBMA: »So technologically-possible hiccups versus the dancer. Discuss!«

Deadbeat: »What’s that?«

RBMA: »Technologically-possible hiccups versus the dancer. Discuss!«

Deadbeat: »Technologically-possible hiccups versus the dancer (looks bemused / laughter)?«

RBMA: »I mean, there you are playing around with your Lego toys: “Ha ha, I can do this, let’s put that on top of there.” And then you’re (makes twitchy dancing gesture)?«

Deadbeat: »Yeah. Whereas I might work on a track for a couple of days, leave it, then come back in a couple of weeks. When I started doing this Crackhaus project all the tracks get done always, always in one afternoon, at the most. Get it done fast, go, go go. OK, next idea. When we play live together we don’t use any midi-sync. It’s all about making things in this extreme physical context as fun and as goofy as possible and approaching things from a child-like context.«

RBMA: »So it’s a childlike electronic punk approach?«

Deadbeat: »Totally, that’s absolutely what it’s like. We tried playing live with drummachines, just with laptops. We did a lot of sets just DJing back and forth, both using Ableton Live. We have built different instruments. (...)«

(music: Crackhaus - Blame Canada! / plays live effects)

»That’s just like, whatever. Yeah, we make toys for Crackhaus.«

RBMA: »So toys and the child-like approach on the one hand, but we were talking earlier about how the electroclash aesthetic somehow resurrected the catchy phrase and the hook line. Also on the other hand, though, it probably gave us some insight into how the original soul boys felt in the '80s when the hip hop movement resurrected their old favourites. All of a sudden you had all these industrial and early electronic pop things popping up all over the place.«

Deadbeat: »Yeah, sampling with regards to nostalgia and cultural reference is a really powerful thing and can create some incredibly strong reactions. The song I just played has a quiet famous blues sample in there and it’s been really interesting to see the diverse reactions in places like Chicago and Detroit where people totally freak out and playing it in China where it’s totally different. They might freak out just because it sounds goofy or funny. But there was no cultural context, there was no bluegrass or Muddy Waters, that’s not part of the cultural fabric there.«

RBMA: »So how do you avoid using stuff just for novelty’s sake?«

Deadbeat: »Because the working process Steve and I employ is very fast, move on to the next thing, so we aren’t concerned about that. We definitely use things exactly for the novelty of using it.«

RBMA: »So if you are using it, it must have some sort of significance.«

Deadbeat: »Absolutely. Obviously, the samples we’re using are from music that is in our collections, things we’ve been listening to, so there’s definitely some sort of significance for us. But at the end of the day, there are definitely sounds that are used that aren’t there, like horse sounds. It’s no holds barred.«

RBMA: »We’re really enjoying the powerful side that things like Ableton do. What are the responsibilities that come along with it?«

Deadbeat: »Responsibilities of using powerful technology (long pause)? I don’t know how to answer that. Particularly in thinking about things from the Crackhaus perspective.«

RBMA: »As long as the pipe is burning, hooray!«

Deadbeat: »Exactly, both in terms of content and the tools that are being used we do things quite irresponsibly, but as long as it’s a good time for us, it’s going to be a good time for the audience, who cares?«

RBMA: »And that’s coming from someone who comes across as a pretty responsible human being.«

Deadbeat: »Yeah.«

RBMA: »So here’s to the inner child, embrace it.«

Deadbeat: »Totally.«

RBMA: »So this is our time to say thank you to the inner child of Mr. Montieth.«

(applause)