Deadbeat

Torsten Schmidt

It’s our pleasure to welcome a young man here. You know you see people from all these different generations and here’s finally one who’s of our age. This is Scott Monteith from...

Deadbeat

Montreal.

Torsten Schmidt

Montreal. Which is which part of Canada?

Deadbeat

Quebec.

Torsten Schmidt

Where you speak what?

Deadbeat

French.

Torsten Schmidt

And how come we can understand you?

Deadbeat

Because it’s early in the morning. It’s like speaking in tongues, I guess.

Torsten Schmidt

First of all, let’s give the man a big hand here. [applause] It’s getting warmer already. Speaking in tongues ... Which brings us to the background. How does a son of a preacher man and a reiki teacher end up listening to Skinny Puppy?

Deadbeat

When I was quite young I had a friend who’s older brother was into it. Obviously. This happens to quite a lot of people. It was fairly formative in deciding what was cool for us. He was the person who influenced me to buy what was probably like the first cassette that I bought, which was Public Enemy. Later he got in some Skinny Puppy, and Throbbing Gristle, and Psychic TV. As a result of that, since we thought he was cool.

Torsten Schmidt

So, the bigger brother decided what was cool ...

Deadbeat

Yeah, totally. My parents were, like a lot of people from that area, the country I guess, hippies. You know? I grew up listening to a lot of Simon and Garfunkel, Bob Dylan and that sort of thing. Getting the initial access to this whole new world was really exciting.

Torsten Schmidt

How did you learn to trust a hippy?

Deadbeat

Whatever. If you grow up with them, they’re lovable folks.

Torsten Schmidt

It’s kind of funny. Lovable folks and all. And folk music being so beautiful and stuff. And how you, as a teenager, tried to rebel against it. Sooner or later you somehow ended up, again, with finding out that all of the stuff that you subconsciously listened to, as a kid, wasn’t that bad in the first place.

Deadbeat

Yeah, totally. I think that definitely, not just with music, but basically any influence in your life. But particularly with music, you find that things tend to go full circle, you know? You’re often end up finding yourself, or arriving at back at places that you’ve been before, in a slightly different context.

Torsten Schmidt

So, on paper Trent Reznor and Chuck D are about that far away [spreads arms apart].

Deadbeat

Right.

Torsten Schmidt

But when you’re 13, that doesn’t really matter to you?

Deadbeat

No. I mean, the end result is very, very different. But if you compare a lot of the production methods, and that sort of thing, that people Nivek Ogre like and the Skinny Puppy guys, and Al Jourgensen from Ministry and Trent Reznor, were using comparison to Keith and Hank Shocklee were doing all of the Public Enemy stuff. The methodologies were the same and a lot of the tools were the same, even if it’s produced in really, really different results. I think that’s something that caries through very much today, in a big, big way.

Torsten Schmidt

Now, you spent most of tonight trying to decide what would be the five tracks that shake your life. I mean, 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. I was trying to remember last night which track release would mark me as the first one that I heard sort of sample-based production and that sort of thing. And this one’s from the album called It Takes A Nation Millions to Hold Us Back. It’s called “Louder Than a Bomb.”

(music: Public Enemy – “Louder Than a Bomb”)

I heard that one for the first time when I was probably 11 or 12 or something like that. It really, really marked me for just the fact that the crowd samples. A friend of mine was pretty certain, after doing some research, were actually crowd samples from the Beatles playing on Ed Sullivan being used as a percussive element. That just really, really flipped my mind when I heard it for the first time. That like, you could use whatever. Essentially, no words, non-musical sounds in a musical context.

Torsten Schmidt

What else is different to you, when you listen to it now, than to your feelings as a teenager? Because obviously, those are your formative of years that shape the way you think about music for the years to come.

Deadbeat

Absolutely. I think I read in Future Music magazine in the UK, there was an interview with Chuck D, talking about some of the production methods that were used for “Miuzi Weighs a Ton” and Nation Of Millions and the with the earliest productions the Shacklees were doing. They were doing like mixed tape paused tapes, basically, where they take whatever sample from a record, recording it to the tape, pausing the tape, going back and recording the sample again and putting these things together in this, whatever, very time consuming way. I was amazed by the sheer amount of time and dedication that producing in that method would take. It also struck me how on a very, sort of low-tech level, that relates really, really strongly to a lot of the kind of loop-based production that’s going on now. You know?

Torsten Schmidt

Low tech is the one thing, but then again some of us were a little bit stoked when Mr. Shocklee told us last year that a lot of sonic boom was basically just taking the SP-12 and just hitting it up through a [inaudible]. What are we going to do now? Raid Sony studios and [inaudible] and it’s not to going to happen. Any sort of strategies that you’ve already learned from that?

Deadbeat

I think that the examples of those sort of early production methods are great example of the fact that the tools are a really, really secondary thing. If you’re passionate about what you’re doing, it’s really about making the most of whatever you’ve got. I’ve heard amazing recordings by different noise artists and things like this, that are a guitar distortion pedal and then screaming the brains out into a microphone that are like incredibly visceral, incredibly powerful recordings. I think that it’s, like I said, making the most of what you’ve got on hand.

Torsten Schmidt

What cultural significance did Public Enemy have where you grew up? I mean, first it was all about New York for them guys and the tri-state area and then they move throughout the states, but you were like the first foreign market, I guess?

Deadbeat

Absolutely. You can definitely argue that there were people beforehand, like the Last Poets and that sort of thing that were forward in an overtly political message, but I think that Public Enemy was really the first, sort of, act that crossed over into the mainstream because the political message was so overt and for 12 and 13-year-olds like myself, at the time... [Torsten Schmidt raises a fist] Totally. Fists in the air, total bad boy music that was really loud and pissed your parents off.

Torsten Schmidt

But apart from the pissed your parents off bit, obviously over there in Germany it was pretty big because you had all of these American service men and it was basically the music that they listened to which in itself is kind of interesting. Because I mean, there they are serving ‘the man,’ as Chuck D would’ve put it, and at the same time listening to all these controversial kind of messages. You see like six-thousands of them on the show just like 20 minutes away from all the nuclear warheads their watching. It’s completely twisted.

Deadbeat

The irony in that is pretty striking. You know?

Torsten Schmidt

How foreign was that from the Canadian ... Like, the whole New York thing and the African American experience in the US, how foreign was that to you?

Deadbeat

I certainly wouldn’t want to speak for the African American experience in the US. While there’s all this talk of securing the border more and more between the states and Canada these days, in terms of cultural exchange it’s a very gray area. Obviously there’s a lot of US influence in Canadian culture and in different music markets and areas of the arts, there’s a lot of Canadian influence in US culture. You know?

Torsten Schmidt

I mean, you were born in Ontario, right?

Deadbeat

Yep.

Torsten Schmidt

So, that’s pretty close to Detroit...

Deadbeat

I mean, whatever. Toronto could essentially be the whatever state that never was. Even geographically, that area of Ontario dips into the United States. I mean, obviously, culturally speaking, because of the French culture and because of the vast cultural diversity in Montreal, we have a very, very different experience there than you do in the rest of Canada. Politically speaking, candidates tended to be more socialists and left-leaning in terms of the signs that you see on the street, and whatever advertising and just the cultural climate in general, there’s a lot of American influence. It’s very difficult to define intrinstically Canadian culture beyond maple syrup and beavers and moose and things, you know.

Torsten Schmidt

On the beavers and moose. There was always a strong exchange between like, Ontario and Michigan and stuff like that.

Deadbeat

Absolutely. In the early to mid-’90s, I think my experience was similar to a lot of peoples’ in the Midwest in Canada and in the States. I wore pants that were way too big and spent a lot of time traveling around following people like Richie Hawtin generally being a degenerate raver, you know?

Torsten Schmidt

While following him, is there another track that maybe...

Deadbeat

Well, with him in mind, there was one I was going to play before, and as we brought him up ... This is a track called “Plasticity” from the first Plastikman album that was really, my first kind of awakening to the power of less being more.

Torsten Schmidt

In a slightly different sense.

Deadbeat

In a totally different sense.

(music: Plastikman - "Plasticity")

Yeah, that’s a bit of a short excerpt. That track is actually about 14 minutes long and one of the fixtures in kind of the rave scene in Toronto in the mid-’90s, which is really great and something that I really have been kind of regretful to see not kind of permeate parties and the sort of club scene these days is ambient rooms. The first time that I heard this song was in an ambient room at about six o’clock in the morning in a state of ...

Torsten Schmidt

Shock.

Deadbeat

Shock, yeah, I guess that’s a good way of putting it. I’ve listened to this song so, so many times at this point, there’s CDs skipping, reel-to-reel tapes being manipulated, just, as I said, finding really extreme ways of pushing the technology and using technology in really extreme, creative ways really, really marked me as quite impressive.

Torsten Schmidt

It’s all about listening environments as well. They did also apply the same kind of technologies to club sort of environments, whatever that meant, in the ’80s. How do you feel these days with the art of the album gone and people just skipping through their iPods and then you have a track which lasts 14 minutes?

Torsten Schmidt

I think that’s a really interesting growth going on at both extremes of the issue, that on one hand with the whole sort of electro-clash movement that went on in the last few years, there seems to have been a kind of turn toward a pop-Euro aesthetic. Now the pendulum is kind of swinging backward. Within the techno scene you see people like Luciano and Ricardo Villalobos playing out with DVD decks and playing mixes that are 20 plus minutes long. You see bands like Growing from Chicago, and Tim Hecker, and a lot of these really, really heavy, drone based music starting to sort of come to the forefront again. I think that’s sort of a natural cycle that happens consistently, you know? In order for things to kind of grow and change, it’s important for the pendulum to swing back and forth between different extremes.

Torsten Schmidt

When the pendulum is in the middle of swinging, you still need to have the right environment. There only way we can qualify it as workspace, background music to fully [inaudible] it. Then again, when you are in relaxing mode, it’s probably not exactly the couch, armchair type of thing.

Deadbeat

Yeah, no, absolutely. For sure.

Torsten Schmidt

It’s headphone material?

Deadbeat

Headphone material, or whatever, I guess that’s the really, really interesting thing about tracks like this. This is 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, you know? It really demands a heavy amount of concentration, and it’s intense listening music. Whether that’s something that you sit down and actually just listen to the thing from beginning to end at home, or whether there are, as there have been in many places of the world, sort of designed intense listening environments, I think that’s when things get really interesting.

Torsten Schmidt

To which extent do you think about the environment that the music will be played in when you do create it yourself?

Deadbeat

I think that the environment has sort of informed what I’m doing more and more in recent years. As I’ve started to tour more, there’s been fairly diverse environments that I’ve had to play in, from whatever regular club context, to sit down listening concerts, to a tugboat in Chile at one point. I think it’s really, really important to be able to use the environment that you’re playing in, regardless of what that is, and really sort of try to take advantage of the context.

Torsten Schmidt

What is your setup when you do play live?

Deadbeat

These days I’ve been, like a lot of people, have been using Ableton Live primarily. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what the most effective way for me to do things was, and thankfully had the opportunity to work in a couple of different contexts and with a couple of different projects. Solo is Deadbeat, I also do a project with my friend, Stephen Beaupré, called Crackhaus, and also a project called Atlantic Waves with Mr. Monolake, Robet Henke. The fun thing, with all of those projects, is trying to figure out how to use this instrument in the most effective way.

Torsten Schmidt

To which extent is the crowd a matter there? Again, to the live aesthetics and like stages and setups and interaction?

Deadbeat

Certainly for the solo stuff, because there's been such a diverse range of environments that I’ve gotten to perform in in recent years, it’s demanded that I try and find some way of being able to change directions on a dime if need be, because you can walk into a place and assume that you know what the context is going to be and what people are going to want to hear, oftentimes, people will let you know very, very vocally if you’ve gone the wrong direction.

Torsten Schmidt

How important do you think is it to actually have the listeners see who is performing the music?

Deadbeat

I think that’s totally context sensitive, you know? There’s some situations where seeing what the performer’s doing can add a lot to it. For the last five years, since laptops have sort of figured more and more heavily into performance, there’s the argument that sitting around and watching somebody who could essentially be checking their email doesn’t provide a particularly enthralling performance experience. I think it really depends on what feels most comfortable to the person and depending on what the venue context is.

Torsten Schmidt

It’s also when you talk about things going full cycle, it’s kind of interesting how many new genres as they evolve always at some stage get to this point of, ‘Hey, we are becoming real musicians now,’ like there was some king knighting you. How did that notion of being a musician change for you over the years?

Deadbeat

I think that it’s really interesting generally to start seeing different band projects and that sort of thing who are expanding the context, or the concept, of musicians as opposed to having bass, drums, guitar, and keyboard player. We’ll have bass, drums, guitar, turntables, and laptop player.

Torsten Schmidt

You’re not talking about the Linkin Park kind of having some dude there so it looks cool, like?

Deadbeat

Yeah, sure. Yeah, totally. Whatever, even full on sort of laptop orchestras, like M.I.M.E.O., for instance, is a great example of that. What were we talking about again?

Torsten Schmidt

We were just talking about how for you the notion of musicianship changed, and whether it was 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. I think that, certainly for my solo stuff in the last year some time, I’ve done a lot of work in trying to figure out how to make this set up of the laptop and this controller be as seamless and as mindless as possible. I know what every single control does and not having to think about, okay if I do this, what happens now?

Torsten Schmidt

How important is it for you to minimize yourself and what it is that you’re using, instead of trying out 800 different decades of technology?

Deadbeat

I’m totally up for using whatever is available. But, in terms of traveling, definitely keeping things compact and minimized is really important.

Torsten Schmidt

Another slightly little influence for you might be the whole dub world. Now, the thing that people learn about dub in the first place is the art of leaving things out, space in the music.

Deadbeat

Certainly. In many ways, going into what we’ve just been talking about using the concept of the computer as an instrument and that whole dub aesthetic, whenever it started in the late sixties was sort of a macrocosm used in the studio as an instrument. Obviously, with the initial players like King Tubby and Lee Perry. For me personally, I sort of arrived at dub backwards. In spending a lot of time in the rave scene and that sort of thing, at some point in the mid-’90s having heard Basic Channel and the Berlin techno dub sound, that was my first contact with that aesthetic. That’s the next of the five songs that change your life. This is a track called “Carrier” by Rhythm & Sound. I’ll just play a little.

(music: Rhythm & Sound – “Carrier”)

Although we haven’t had the chance to do quite as much in recent years or recent months in Montreal, within my circle of friends we used to run a weekend pretty much every weekend did an event that we call Demolition that was essentially bringing in whatever you had been working on whether it was one track or two tracks or whatever and sitting down with a group of your nearest and dearest and just having a really no holds barred critic session.

The worst of times can definitely get ugly. Coming in and putting something on and people sitting there and being like, “Okay, your kick couldn’t kick itself out of a white paper bag, your synth melodies are cheesy, your bass is muddy, and I like your hi-hats.” Certainly not to suggest that there needs to be that really hard core criticism in place to get things done. I think that it’s incredibly important to have a community of people that you trust around you who are willing to tell it to you straight. That’s a crucial part of growing creatively.

Torsten Schmidt

How do you keep up physically and all that to sort of community building where criticism is allowed in a time when almost anyone known to man is too busy exchanging very charming and pleasing and affirmative MySpace messages and can’t be bothered to get out of the house anymore?

Deadbeat

I think we’ve been really fortunate in Montreal in that for the last seven years, there’s been a very tight community of producers and DJs and hangers-on involved with the MUTEK festival. From the very beginning of that, that’s been a very family-oriented, very organically evolving organization both in terms of the people that are involved with it and also in terms of the events themselves. Whether you’re talking about the kind of festival proper that happens every June, or the micro MUTEK events that have gone on, or the dinners and the Demolition events that people associated with that have been involved with. I think that feeling that you’re surrounded by people who care about what you’re doing and who want to see you succeed and that you want to see succeed, whether you’re talking about a group of 50 or 60 who are running a festival over here, or whether you’re talking about five people in your hometown that have that sort of positive reinforcement in place is totally crucial.

Torsten Schmidt

To what extent do you think the place where music is actually done on the scene is determining the actual outcome?

Deadbeat

That’s really tough to say these days. I think that with technological mobility that becomes less and less of a factor speaking, specifically about electronic based music in terms of real musicians or live instrumentation. Obviously we’re all sort of a product of our environment, and I think that’s a really, really, gray area these days.

Torsten Schmidt

Why didn’t you have the feeling or the urge to move to either New York, London or, God knows, Berlin?

Deadbeat

Well, at the time that I move to Montreal 11 years ago. I don’t know how to put it. Anyway, there were a lot of people who’ve kind of arrived at the city at the same time with a lot of t same motivations and with similar kinds of backgrounds that somehow manage to all connect and start putting together what eventually would manifest as the MUTEK festival and other events that were related to it.

Obviously I think that different areas in the world sort of become kind of nexus points for different creative centers and motivations, and obviously, Berlin is certainly probably the nexus for anybody these days, anybody sort of related to the whole kind of minimal techno aesthetic.

Torsten Schmidt

What are the things you’ve learned observing various evolving scenes over the years with people who might live in one place of the world or the other, and feel kind of excluded of ‘what’s going on’ somewhere else in the world and know things to encourage people to go out and build their own?

Deadbeat

I’ve had people tell me that this is a sort of pessimistic view at different times, but the thing I’ve always found very encouraging, regardless of where you go in the world, people have the same motivations and are wanting the same things and they’re essentially caring about the same stuff and want to have a context within which to be themselves and get done what they need to get done, but there are scenes that have popped up in the most random places that have been really, really thriving.

Again, to go back to the Midwest, to have places like Milwaukee, or Detroit, that’s a perfect example. Totally industrial town. Totally with having the industry having collapsed at some point and having so many people out of work for that to become a real nexus point for electronic music is really astounding. If people can manage to find even a handful of people within their own communities that are motivated and willing to work together and push each other, scenes and communities around music can really be built anywhere.

Torsten Schmidt

And then, I guess that really depends how you measure the success of these developments in the first place because it depends on what you’re after, whether you do want to have a working or living environment where you can ultimately do what you artistically do want to do.

Deadbeat

Absolutely. All of the people in this room are a creative group of people, otherwise we wouldn’t be working on music, and I think that sometimes you need to apply that creativity to the context in which, not just with the music, but sort of the community context in which you’re working.

I encountered a great example of that when I was in Sidney this past weekend. A guy by the name of Simchan, who, I guess, has been fairly instrumental in developing things in this scene here in Australia, encountered a situation in which he had a lot of friends who were getting older, who weren’t necessarily wanting to be going out to clubs every weekend, who were having kids, who didn’t have the opportunity to do that, but were still very much passionate music listeners, and wanted to know what was going on and may not necessarily have had the time or the money to be going out to look for new music all the time.

The situation they developed is they have this sort of music club dinner where everybody gets together once a week and brings new music that they’ve bought or someone goes up and suggest CDs at different times when people have been in from out of town to play shows. I did a sort of little live performance demo and whatever, and I think that that, again, is totally completely removed from sort of standard club context but provides an essential service to that community in that they’re still getting access to music and still having their sort of creative energies fed by new input.

Torsten Schmidt

With sales as one column of traditional incomes for musicians being slightly on the fret, to what extent do you need to tour to live an artist these days?

Deadbeat

That’s something that comes up in conversations with in contexts like this all the time and my experience, and I think the experience of a lot of people these days is that where as previously the idea was that people were touring in order to sell records within a traditional band context. Within the electronic music community, and certainly in my context, you’re making records to tour. That’s the sort of bread and butter, that’s what pays the rent.

Torsten Schmidt

Why are you still paying rent if you’re touring all the time then?

Deadbeat

That’s a good question. I think that certainly for me, even if it’s a completely disheveled glorified closet, it’s really, really, important for me, even if I’m only there a couple of months a year, it’s really important to have something that I can say, “Okay. This is home base. This is somewhere that you can go and unplug and feel comfortable and walk around in your pajamas and slippers for a few weeks.”

Torsten Schmidt

What are the Deadbeat rules for the road?

Deadbeat

The rules for the road, god. I don’t know. I’m still trying to figure those out. Certainly one of the most important things is that, with touring, all of this is based on relationships, and there are going to be tons and tons of context, situations in which you arrive somewhere and you have nothing that’s on your technical rider and things aren’t set up and the sound system sounds like crap and the promoter’s drunk, but there’s a good chance that you may need to be playing at that club again at some point in the future, and that it’s really important not to freak out and blow up and go home and trash the hotel room, and whatever. Just basically as with anything, it’s important if you want to get treated well, and if you want to sustain things, it’s important to foster relationships.

Torsten Schmidt

How do you keep up loving relationships and real loving relationships with people who might not necessarily keep it real in the first place? The nightlife is the shady life.

Deadbeat

Absolutely, but I think certainly in the context of this scene that I’m in it’s a fortunately fairly small, fortunately and unfortunately a very very small community, so yeah. I mean just with considering basic rules of human decency and whatever, sending people email every so often to giving people a phone call even if it’s got nothing to do with playing a gig or whatever, and just to say what’s up and sustaining those friendships is key.

Torsten Schmidt

Okay, but that’s friendships already. That’s one step beyond it. You still got those working relationships with, let’s say at one club somewhere in Europe that you just need to go to because you know that’s going to pay you the rent for the next three months. How do you over come your inner pick hound, like, “Okay, I really loathe this guy but I really need to play there because it’s going to save my butt for the next weeks?”

Deadbeat

That’s a tough one. Fortunately I haven’t really run into that situation too much. I mean, sure, the community is small, but I don’t think that’s not a situation. Obviously you don’t want to put yourself in a situation where you’re feeling abused. Even if it’s the best club in town, there’s going to be a club down the street that might be smaller, might not pay as much but it’s going to be a better experience.

Torsten Schmidt

Little by little. A chipmunk eats as well?

Deadbeat

Exactly.

Torsten Schmidt

Now you are on the road, you encounter different characters that you would really love to do music with and five minutes later you’re 4,000 miles apart. Now being a little technologically savvy, you somehow found a way to deal with these situations and still get on creatively.

Deadbeat

Yeah, there’s probably the best example of that is the first time that I met Robert Henke and Monolake was at a trade show that happens every year in Anaheim, California called NAMM...

Tosten Schmidt

Why were you at the trade show on the first place?

Deadbeat

Because at the time I was working for a company called Applied Acoustic Systems that makes various software synthesizers, the primary one being one called Task Man, which is a big modular environment that you can basically build anything that you want to and similar to Reactor and Maximus P, and Robert and I really hit it off and at the time, one night came up with this idea of how funny it would be to be able to do performances over the internet, and there’s been other people who have sort of approach that sort of thing.

Obviously Future Sound Of London had a lot in the mid-’90s to the kind of remote tour with their ISDN album. For us, eventually what manifested after a lot of discussion about what was crucial for things from a performance context was a program called Atlantic Waves, and the way that we divided up the responsibility for that is Robert being the Maximus P hacking geek that he is, put together an interface that’s basically a glorified 808 drum machine, and I designed the individual sounds for it. I don’t think we’re going to be able to see this, unless we move the camera. I can describe it. It’s an 8-track, 16 step sequencer, and the way that it works is there’s a connection over internet protocol called OSC that allows you to send MIDI data and audio data, if you want, over the net, and the way that it works is there’s a small chat window that allows us to discuss what we’re performing. There’s two display areas that show the time in Berlin or Montreal or wherever the first person is and another one that says the time where where the other person is, and data that gets entered by one person shows up as one color and steps that get entered by the other person show up as a different color so that the audience can really really clearly see who’s entering what.

There it is [shot of computer program]. You can sort of see it anyway.

Torsten Schmidt

So at this stage it looks more or less not like a glorified 808 but more like a glorified Pac-Man or something.

Deadbeat

Atari. Yeah, totally. As I say, this is the individual sounds. [moves cursor around on computer screen] These buttons allow you to play the sequences back and forth. It’s just a 32-step sequencer, basically. Initially when we developed this the sounds were right in the program and eventually what we found was a much better solution, a much more CPU efficient solution was actually to host this just simply as a control interface and then loading the individual sounds into Ableton Live. This is just basically working as another software MIDI sequencer in triggering the sounds out of Ableton Live. The advantage to that also meant that we could use Live‘s internal effects and could control different parameters of that from this interface as well, so it really sort of expanded the sonic palette of things.

Torsten Schmidt

Maybe to get a little less abstract, maybe a little demo of something? Even though we only get like the one side of it.

Deadbeat

Sadly I can’t demo this one. This is actually just a JPEG of this.

Torsten Schmidt

Obviously at this stage it may seem too many people still like a little widget, gadget, whatnot, but what are the perspectives behind it?

Deadbeat

The idea when we were thinking about how to approach this was really, again, coming back to his kind of less is more aesthetic of really taking a collection of very few sounds and trying to figure out how to push those to the absolute maximum. The longest performance we’ve done with this is I guess probably an hour. That less is more aesthetic really, really figured heavily into the design of this thing. Because it’s basically a drum machine, we were thinking about, well look at an 808, look at a 909, these are drum machines that have been around for years and anybody who’s had any experience with those putting on a pair of headphones and mucking around knows that you can play for hours on them. With very few parameters to control. I think that, in a larger context, not just with this, but with software design in general, it’s becoming clearer and clearer and more and more important that interface is really everything. If people can’t jump into the something and figure out what’s going in a very short period of time, they’re not going to end up using it.

Torsten Schmidt

Did you see that interface which is almost like the Minority Report already?

Deadbeat

No.

Torsten Schmidt

It’s like three steps further than the thing that they had at Sony years ago so you can actually touch the surface and draw things with your finger and make stuff go away and you don’t even have to look like Tom Cruise while doing it.

Deadbeat

Right.

Torsten Schmidt

It’s something there. With all these almost infinite possibilities the technology is offering us, how do you limit yourself to not get lost in the matrix and keep a decent working environment more feasible?

Deadbeat

In terms of in a production context, I, like a lot of people, ended up at some point with just hundreds of different VST effects and everything on the computer and one day sort of sat down and realized that I was using about four of them. But before trashing everything I went through every single thing that was there and really sort of whittled things down to whatever, the essentials, you know? I think that generally speaking that’s, going back to this whole idea of the computer as an instrument, I think that’s a really, really crucial part of working toward that and achieving a context of having your computer be an instrument. Even all the different plug-ins and things that are on it, that you really know if you make this adjustment and adjust it by that much to whatever parameter it is, then you know that that’s what it’s going to be.

Torsten Schmidt

How do you overcome the scare of really knowing what this thing is doing? Just really knowing what one single plug-in does can take you a week or so and then if you got those 200 on there because you got all the cracks and we’re human beings and like have fault.

Deadbeat

I mean, this goes back to the interface discussion. As with anything, some plug-in effects or some software paradigms are going to appeal to you the way that you work. I think that fairly quickly you can establish whether that plug-in effect or that program does appeal to the way that you work.

Torsten Schmidt

Fairly quickly, that’s you saying who’s been working in like a software company for a couple of years now. If somehow know, because we are all of this generation who kind of grew up with computers, yada-yada-yada, but still some interfaces still look totally alien to you. How do you overcome the technology scare there? Or how do you pressure designers to make the interfaces more user-friendly?

Deadbeat

Obviously, because I was working for a software company, I mean for the companies that I am using their products at this point, I’ll try it all, but writing them or calling them and being like, “Look this is just not working. This doesn’t make sense. You should really do it this way.” Software developers, small software developers are a lot like small labels. They’re really, really open to having people do essentially that and want people to do essentially that. It’s remarkable how often you’ll find those suggestions implemented very, very quickly.

Torsten Schmidt

Again, it’s up to open up the dialogue and...

Deadbeat

Absolutely.

Torsten Schmidt

Constructive criticism.

Deadbeat

It’s often not considered that, when thinking about electronic music communities or music communities in general, the software companies are an essential part of that community. I think like a lot of people, when I started making music on the computer, used a lot of cracked software. I think that’s a reality. Everybody has used crack software at some point. I think that it’s important to consider that the companies that are making that. If you want the tools to continue to be developed it’s important to support their development. I take a fairly liberal view of it. My opinion has always been that if you’re not making any money off the thing, if you’re just having fun at home or you’re just sort of getting going, I don’t have any problem with people using crack software. I think that...

Torsten Schmidt

As soon as you earn you should give back to those who help you earn.

Deadbeat

Within reason, too. If you’re using a program that costs $1,000 and it takes you three years to make $1,000 off the music that you’re making, then maybe you buy it after the three years. Maybe you don’t necessarily have to go out and buy it when you made your first ten bucks. I think it is important to consider that aspect of the community as well.

Torsten Schmidt

Do you think it’s a little harder to implement these sort of effects because it’s a little less facial again? I mean you have these beautiful pictures of the late Robert Moog and obviously you would never go into a shop and steal a Moog.

Deadbeat

Certainly.

Torsten Schmidt

Let alone you would be quick enough to run away with it.

Deadbeat

Absolutely. I think that kind of literalist view of software privacy denies the reality that we’re living in. This is something that, on the other side, software companies really need to start looking at in terms of the way that they’re dealing with security in their anti-piracy devices, that they’re not penalizing the users... There’s tons of different examples of that where the people who go out and buy are spending more time working around trying to get the security devices, the anti-piracy devices, working properly when the guy down the street who downloaded the crack is up and running immediately.

Torsten Schmidt

How can we as users try to work towards a change then?

Deadbeat

I think that again just goes back to this idea of building community and having dialogue with the software companies. There’s a very, very rare exception in talking about Emagic who’s now owned by Apple and a handful of other companies. The people who are making music software are small companies. They’re four, five, ten people that are working in the office who are easily approachable by phone and by email and are willing to discuss future developments.

Torsten Schdmit

Back when Emagic was still Emagic and the company who wrote Logic in the first place and all it’s earlier versions, they had a go at this like internet based interface kind of thing as well. Why do you think it disappeared so quickly?

Deadbeat

There’s still bandwidth issues. Digidesign has got different solutions with regards to Pro Tools that allow people to exchange files and that sort of thing over high speed lines. There’s still issues in terms of a musician playing violin in Los Angeles with a guy playing piano in Tokyo and a drummer in Berlin. There’s still issues of latency in terms of bandwidth and that sort of thing. That’s something I think we’ll definitely see in the future, but I just don’t think technologically things are there yet for full on collaboration.

Torsten Schmidt

Latency is one issue there, but to which extent does it really makes sense to have a band being spread out all over the globe.

Deadbeat

That’s the other context. That for sure goes into some very, very deep philosophical issues of whether the bass player can really vibe off the guitar player when he’s in Tokyo. I don’t know. That will be interesting to see how those technologies manifest.

Torsten Schmidt

No matter how far the technology goes and the possibilities, you’re still advocating the human element.

Deadbeat

Advocating what, sorry?

Torsten Schmidt

The human element.

Deadbeat

Absolutely. For sure. Within the context of Atlantic Waves, I can assure you that the human element was definitely there even though we were a chat window and he was pink and I was blue. Entering steps in a drum machine. That’s definitely there.

Torsten Schmidt

How long did you fight over who was picking which color?

Deadbeat

It was always from the beginning, Robert was going to be pink and I was going to be blue. Most definitely.

Torsten Schmist

We heard your influences, but we haven’t heard any of the stuff that you do on your own. Would you like to give us a demo of that?

Deadbeat

Sure. I’ll start off with some solo stuff. We’re talking about things within the idea of using the studio as an instrument and for the solo stuff that I’ve been doing these days, which definitely comes from this sort of dub aesthetic, the set up that I’ve developed with Ableton and with this controller is definitely in a very, very classic sort of mixer and FX and whatever. Trying to play things live as much as possible. Where are we here. Is this me? That’s me.

(music: Deadbeat – unknown track / applause)

Torsten Schmidt

How do you demo music in 30 seconds that usually takes 20 minutes to build up?

Deadbeat

That’s a good question. It’s difficult to sort of condense something that takes a lot longer to kind of organically grow and develop pretty quickly.

Torsten Schmidt

How do you develop ear catching elements in your compositions when you shy away from the [inaudible]?

Deadbeat

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

Torsten Schmidt

While working how do you manage the eye-to-ear ratio? Obviously, with an interface like the computer, live, there’s a lot more demanding to your eyes than let’s say Tubby in his shed.

Deadbeat

Yeah, well I think definitely for the final mix of things or for any sort of like EQing decisions, compression decisions and that sort of thing, I always close the lid and will totally remove, because it becomes far, far too easy to be like okay, “Well this is clipping. This is going over, or this is sitting perfectly at zero and I want it perfectly at zero because I want this to be as loud as possible.”

A lot of times, within the computer, it might sound better if your kick drum is clipping and you can worry about that afterwards and it might sound better even though you don’t want to lose the bass in your bass, it might end up sounding better if you end up shelving a whole lot of low rumble. It might end up sounding better if you shelf out certain areas on your snare. I think that while the visual feedback, in terms of performance programs like Live and whatever you choose to use are great, that you can really get a very clear picture of what’s going on in terms of production decisions. It’s important to really use your ears because regardless of whether the frequency analyzer says that everything’s balanced really well, it doesn’t matter, if it doesn’t sound good then it doesn’t sound good.

Torsten Schmidt

How do you monitor your stuff then?

Deadbeat

With speakers?

Torsten Schmidt

With speakers, or what, on the road. You’re not going to sit down while traveling, while waiting for the train, the bus, the plane to arrive and you’re not going to have like these things right under your arm.

Deadbeat

For sure. I mean, this trip is actually a fairly interesting example of that. I’m supposed to have stuff pretty much done for a new album pretty much by the end of November. I’ve got sort of the basic ideas, but haven’t really done much of the tracking for the individual tracks. Thankfully I was in San Francisco before coming out her for a week with access to a great studio with a Neve desk and every two compressor you could possibly want. Essentially just spent the week there getting things tweaked out and sounding good and with that done, now I know that I can go and track things on headphones and not worry about how things are sounding. The initial elements are sounding good there, and that I can do the layout stuff on the headphones and then go back to the studio when that’s done, make sure there aren’t any huge errors, and feel comfortable.

Torsten Schmidt

Tracking on headphones can be slightly dangerous to your ears. They’re your most valuable asset.

Deadbeat

Absolutely.

Torsten Schmidt

I mean, it’s pretty easy to fuck them up real easy with headphones.

Deadbeat

Yeah, no, for sure. I mean, not only physically dangerous to be jacking things through the headphones like day in and day out and really running the risk of doing damage to your ears. It can also be dangerous in the context of the way a mix ends up sounding. Depending on the headphones that you’re using, you often times overcompensate. You will almost always overcompensate on one end or the other, having hi-hats that are just screaming or having bass that’s just way, way, way too loud.

Torsten Schmidt

How do you keep some sort of a continuity in your sound when you have constantly to change your monitoring situations?

Deadbeat

I think that at the end of the day, if you can make something sound good on the crappiest speakers in your house, you’re probably going to be pretty set that it’s going to sound good on the biggest systems in the world. Obviously the more systems you play on, the more you’ll learn about the music that is coming out of your computer, and it’s important to play things in as many contexts as possible. I often times call my neighbor and get him when I’ve got things done and get him to take me for a drive around in a car. I mean, there’s a lot of people with cars like the crucial listening spot because it sounds good in a car, it’s going to sound good pretty much anywhere.

Torsten Schmidt

What kinds of cars are we talking about, like trucks?

Deadbeat

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

Torsten Schmidt

How do you let your sound compete with the natural growl of a Maserati then?

Dedbeat

Well, I mean, that’s part of the choice of listening to music in that car. If the bass drowns out the hum of the engine then you know you’ve got things right.

Torsten Schmidt

Well then, so the basic ingredient is just to find a neighbor with a Maserati and you’re set.

Deadbeat

Exactly, that’s all you need.

Torsten Schmidt

I think that’s going to be an easy one then. Any questions on the issues of finding a Maserati neighbor? It is coming, it is coming all the way around.

Audience Member

[inaudible]

Deadbeat

Future Jamaican music?

Audience Member

[inaudible]

Deadbeat

Being somebody who’s passionate about everything from metal and ska, right through to dancehall now, if there’s anywhere in the world that’s managed to consistently re-define its music and consistently re-invent and create things that are new and exciting and fresh – while I can’t really predict what the future of that music is going to look like, there’s nowhere in the world that I’ve got more confidence is going to come up with something fresh and new and mind blowing.

Audience Member

Do you have [inaudible] do you feel the way your music has developed is because you’ve lost certain parts of your hearing or things like that?

Deadbeat

The terrible thing is actually somewhere that’s like an ear doctor that’s around the corner of my house that makes custom ear plugs.

Torsten Schmidt

It’s a pretty good neighborhood, is it? You got a Maserati, you got an ear doctor.

Deadbeat

Yeah, totally. [laughs] I’ve been putting it off forever, and I really hope that the music I’m making doesn’t have to do with huge ranges in spectrum that...

Audience Member

How people build their sound around the engineers that have been there for so long [inaudible]?

Deadbeat

That’s a scary thing to think about. It’s something that I guess we all sort of have to deal with and something that we all need to be sure to think about is taking care of our ears in all contexts.

Torsten Schmidt

We should probably play some of the more up tempo stuff as well, maybe that will stimulate more questions. First let’s –

Audience Member

[inaudible]

Deadbeat

It wasn’t that many tracks afterward. I think it was probably in the neighborhood of ten tracks. The cool thing is that the first track that I ever made actually became sort of the ambient backing stuff for a track that came out on the first album a couple years afterwards.

Audience Member

[inaudible]

Yep, totally, yep. Sure. I mean, in context that’s Steve who is the other half of Crackhaus just finished a solo album which came out on MUTEK and I think in September was the official release date, but he also just had a baby. Things have been kind of on hold with that stuff, but it’s definitely something that we’re going to get back into in the coming months. Yes, it is definitely the yin to the Deadbeat yang. I’ll play a track. This is a track from a label that was started with Steve, myself, Mark Accuphen, and a guy by the name of Vasan Amir in Montreal called Music Risque, and it’s from a 12" that we released a year and half to two years now called “Blame Canada.” Here it is.

(music: Crackhaus - “Blame Canada” / applause)

Torsten Schmidt

Technologically possible hiccups was the dancer, discuss.

Deadebeat

What’s that?

Torsten Schmidt

Technologically possible hiccups was the dancer. Discuss.

Deadbeat

Technologically possible hiccups was the dancer?

Torsten Schmidt

Yeah. I mean, there you are, playing around with your Lego toys like, “Haha, I can do this, hooray, and let’s build this on top of there and then you’re there and like...”

Deadbeat

The whole thing with when Steve and I started this Crackhaus project was really like all of the tracks get done where as opposed to I might work on a track myself for a couple of days or something or work on it for a couple of days and leave it and come back to it for a couple of weeks, we do tracks always, always in no longer than an afternoon, like get it done fast, go, go, go, next idea, next idea. When we play live together we don’t use any MIDI sync. Everything is all about the extreme, physical process of making music and making things as fun and as loud and as goofy as possible and just really approaching things from a childlike context.

Torsten Schmidt

So it’s a childlike electronic punk approach then?

Deadbeat

Totally, that’s totally what it’s like. We’ve played live with just drum machines, with just the laptops. We did a lot of sets that were just kind of DJing back and forth, both using Ableton Live. We have built different instruments. One guy that we ended up calling the Rand drum that we ended up using that I build and using a reactor, that just ... That’s just like whatever. [plays sounds on computer] We make toys to make music for Crackhaus.

Torsten Schmidt

So, toys in a childlike approach on one hand, but we were talking about earlier like how the electro clash aesthetic somehow resurrected the catchy phrase and the hook line and stuff. On the other hand also for the first time for our generation probably let us understand how original soul boys felt in the ’80s when hip-hop resurrected their old favorties and all of the sudden you had all of these industrial and early electronic kind of poppy things popping up all over the screen, literally.

Deadbeat

That’s sort of sampling with regards to nostalgia and cultural reference is a really, really powerful thing and produces some incredibly strong reactions from people. The song that I just played has got a quite famous blues sample in it and it’s been really interesting to see the diverse reactions that if you play this in Chicago or Detroit or whatever where this is this sort of history of that people totally freak out. Playing it in Japan, playing it in China was totally different. People might freak out just because it sounds goofy or funny, but there was no cultural context out there, there was no bluegrass like Muddy Waters whatever, that’s not part of the sort of cultural fabric there.

Torsten Schmidt

How do you overcome using stuff just for the sake of the novelty of using it?

Deadbeat

Because the working the working process that Steve and I employ with Crackhaus is that sort of very fast get it done and move on to the next thing, we’ve definitely used things exactly just for the novelty of using it.

Torsten Schmidt

Because of the effect that you are using it it must have some sort of significance?

Deadbeat

Totally. Obviously, the samples from different music is coming from music that are in our collections that we’re 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 for novelty, there are horse sounds and things in some of our tracks you know. It’s just no holds barred.

Torsten Schmidt

You just were really enjoying the powerful side of the things that the technology enabled you to. What are the responsibilities that you feel that come along with it?

Deadbeat

The responsibilities of using powerful technology?

Torsten Schmidt

Yeah.

Deadbeat

I don’t know. I don’t know how to answer that. Particularly in thinking from this sort of Crackhaus perspective, I think that we ...

Torsten Schmidt

As long as the pipe is burning, hooray.

Deadbeat

Exactly. Totally. I mean, both in terms of content and in terms of the tools that are being used, I think we have used things quite irresponsibly, but as long as it’s a good time for us as and the end result ends up being a good time for the audience, then who cares?

Torsten Schmidt

And that’s coming from somebody who comes across as a pretty responsible human being.

Deadbeat

Yeah, I mean, whatever.

Torsten Schmidt

Here’s to the inner child.

Deadbeat

Yeah, exactly.

Torsten Schmidt

Embrace it.

Deabeat

Totally.

Torsten Schmidt

Well, I think this is now time to say thank you to the inner child of Scott Monteith.

[applause]