{"id":20974,"date":"2015-07-16T13:57:18","date_gmt":"2015-07-16T11:57:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.deephouseamsterdam.com\/?p=20974"},"modified":"2015-07-16T15:43:43","modified_gmt":"2015-07-16T13:43:43","slug":"interview-deadbeat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.deephouseamsterdam.com\/london\/interview-deadbeat\/","title":{"rendered":"Interview: Deadbeat"},"content":{"rendered":"

Deadbeat is the pseudonym of Scott Monteith, a multifaceted DJ\/producer from Canada. <\/strong><\/p>\n

Now residing in Berlin, Monteith has put his stamp on records from some of the scene\u2019s most focal labels, while his own imprint, the always excellent BLKRTZ<\/strong>, has also become renowned as a vehicle for more-than-solid Deadbeat fare.<\/p>\n

His latest release sees him switch his attention to Detroit\u2019s Visionquest<\/strong> collective thanks to the brilliant The Jacks<\/strong> EP, which is a solid collection of club tackle if ever there was one. We put a few choice questions his way recently, and during our conversation Scott managed to touch on everything from U.S. foreign policy to his Drum n\u2019 Bass past to his infatuation with his Berlin\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cI think everyone has to find their own path and if someone is happy playing pure bangers for 8 hours then all the power to them…I’d much rather pull a nice selection of diverse stuff even if it’s at different tempos and from different eras.\u201d<\/em><\/span><\/h3>\n

Tell us about the beginning of your career, what were the sounds\/parties that got you started?
\n<\/strong>I spent my teens and early twenties in Toronto and then Montreal. Toronto of the mid nighties was a very thriving scene which had a fairly equal split of influences, Detroit and Chicago on the one hand, and Jungle and Drum n Bass on the other due to a fair number of British Expats who moved over and started throwing parties on a large scale. I gravitated more toward the jungle side of things to begin with and as the first Basic Channel and Plastikman records came out I ended up pulled more in that direction. When I started Djing I played a mix of those things and a lot of ambient stuff. I started making music when I moved up to Montreal at the end of \u201897 and I think all of those influences played a part in shaping the early sounds I ended up making.<\/p>\n

What were you into before house? Are you a pretty diverse guy musically? Do you think that\u2019s important as a DJ?
\n<\/strong>In my early teens I was into a lot of skate punk and industrial music like skinny puppy and the whole Psychic TV\/Coil\/Throbbing Gristle axis which eventually lead me to the harder strains of techno and early UK electronic stuff, Warp, etc. I still listen to a lot of different music. I have a huge reggae and dub collection, lot’s of ambient and drone stuff from classics things like Terry Riley all the way up to super heavy more modern stuff like Earth and Sunn(((O. I still make trips to Hard Wax and Space Hall here in Berlin every couple of weeks. All these diverse inputs play their own crucial part in my artistic development and general happiness I’d think.<\/p>\n

So what do you make of DJs who only play house and techno? Are they limiting themselves in a way?
\n<\/strong>I think everyone has to find their own path and if someone is happy playing pure bangers for 8 hours then all the power to them. As I myself do tend to like a pretty wide range of things I get a lot of enjoyment out of sharing music with people they might not have otherwise had a chance to hear. I’d much rather pull a nice selection of diverse stuff even if it’s at different tempos and from different eras.<\/p>\n

And how did you get started with making tunes? Through computers or analogue gear or what?
\n<\/strong>I’m very much a computer guy as that’s where I started though different pieces of hardware have floated in and out of the studio at different times. What ever it takes to get the job done really, I’m very comfortable with both working methods at this point.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

What motivated you back then to make music? And what motivates you now? <\/strong>
\nIn the beginning I simply didn’t want to do anything else. Happily 15 years on that is still very much true.<\/p>\n

What would you say is your greatest achievement from a musical perspective? Is your greatest achievement necessarily your proudest one?
\n<\/strong>Without a doubt being asked to remix the Orb and Lee Scratch Perry last year not once, but twice. They also gave me the vinyl rights to put out the mixes on my label BLKRTZ. There really is no better feeling then being asked to remix your heroes.<\/p>\n

You have a release due out on Visionquest soon that I believe is essentially a remix of an old release of yours. What made you want to revisit it? And how did you find the whole process?
\n<\/strong>The Mecca Drum Jack track was one that Ryan was always a fan of and I still remember the look on his face when I played it for him at an after party many years ago here in Berlin. I had been playing an edit of it out in my sets recently and thought it might be a good time to put it out there again, so I gave him a call and the rest is history as they say.<\/p>\n

How are things going in Berlin for you right now? Does it still fascinate you like it did when you first moved there?
\n<\/strong>Yes I still find it an incredibly inspiring place to be musically and it is a wonderful place to be raising a family.<\/p>\n

Do you ever see yourself moving home or are you very settled there these days?
\n<\/strong>For the time being I would say we are very happy here and don’t see heading home to Canada as an option anytime soon, particularly with the psychotically right wing Harper government running the country into the ground. It’s incredibly depressing really. There used to be a measure of pried associated with saying you were Canadian, now we are one of the worst environmental offenders in the world, have a pathetic human rights record with our own native communities which is only getting worse. The government is passing domestic security laws even more draconian than the US Patriot act that came in after 9\/11, they’ve gutted the national public broadcaster and Canada Council for the Arts… I could go on for days. No great surprise then that you find so many Canadian artists over here in Europe these days with very little interest in going back.<\/p>\n

If your house was burning down and you could only save one thing what would it be?
\n<\/strong>My daughter obviously.<\/p>\n

And what 3 items would you bring to a desert island?
\n<\/strong>A salt water based power generator, laptop computer with satellite wifi, and a credit card. A few large orders from Amazon and a deftly negotiated sponsorship deal from a Jamaican Rum company and I’d have the place tricked out and ready to invite the friends to come and party on our own little slice of paradise within a week.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s next on the agenda for Deadbeat then?
\n<\/strong>This month I’m working hard to finish my 10th<\/sup> album, Walls and Dimensions which will be coming out on my BLKRTZ label at the end of October. I’ll be releasing 2 vinyl only singles in the run up to it, the first is a 40 minute drone ambient piece and the second features extended dubs of 2 of the tracks from the album. I’ll be back on the road in August and for the majority of the rest of the year. Looking very much forward to sharing the new tunes with people.<\/p>\n

Deadbeat\u2019s The Jacks EP is out soon on Visionquest <\/em>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Soundcloud <\/a><\/span> Artist Page <\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Deadbeat is the pseudonym of Scott Monteith, a multifaceted DJ\/producer from Canada. Now residing in Berlin, Monteith has put his stamp on records from some of the scene\u2019s most focal labels, while his own imprint, the always excellent BLKRTZ, has also become renowned as a vehicle for more-than-solid Deadbeat fare. His latest release sees him […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34,"featured_media":20976,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"audio","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3971],"tags":[6435,5909,6436,4601],"class_list":["post-20974","post","type-post","status-publish","format-audio","has-post-thumbnail","category-interviews-london","tag-blkrtz","tag-deadbeat","tag-the-jacks","tag-visionquest-london","post_format-post-format-audio"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.deephouseamsterdam.com\/london\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20974","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.deephouseamsterdam.com\/london\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.deephouseamsterdam.com\/london\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.deephouseamsterdam.com\/london\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/34"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.deephouseamsterdam.com\/london\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20974"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.deephouseamsterdam.com\/london\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20974\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.deephouseamsterdam.com\/london\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20976"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.deephouseamsterdam.com\/london\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20974"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.deephouseamsterdam.com\/london\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20974"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.deephouseamsterdam.com\/london\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20974"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}