Deadbeat & Daniel Tate - Lazy Jane (BLKRTZ, 30 April)

Deadbeat & Danuel Tate - Lazy Jane (BLKRTZ, 30 April)

Following his 12" for Exone that we were rather into, Deadbeat fires out another intriguing cut, a collaboration with Cobblestone Jazz's Danuel Tate that's reminiscent of the Main Street releases, with a deep dub and a jacking house rework of the same material. Danuel Tate's vocals are a strange beast; tremulous wails heavily distorted by a vocoder, and whilst I usually dislike (Read: utterly despise) vocoder work, Tate creates an intriguing tension between organic, soulful and harshly mechanistic sounds that feels fresh. The A-side plays very much in the Tikiman/ Burial mix style; a loping dub composed of little more than a kick, a woodblock hit and two-note bass riffs, before introducing Tate's vocals and warpy valve organ flourishes. It's a typically warm Deadbeat production that's very much made for the smoking, and a solid addition to any record box. On the flipside, Lazy Jane 909 Dub is exactly as it sounds; a classic house-driven dub workout of kicks and claps, stripping away the vocals and throwing all the synths into the echo chamber to bounce around. It's probably the most beguilingly straightforward cut from BLKRTZ so far, and has more in common with the retro-analogue style of Horizontal Ground or Jonas Kopp than the experimentalism of ~scape Monteith cited as his inspiration, but it's a quality counterpoint to the A-side's somnambulic half-time shuffle.

Deadbeat's greatest strength is his ability to combine an encyclopedic knowledge of dub with a his own unique approach to sound - Radio Rothko and Drawn & Quartered are great examples of combining intelligence and passion to create great music. Despite the high calibre of both tracks, Lazy Jane does err a little too heavily on the fanboyisms, skirting dangerously on the edge of pastiche and wearing its influences proudly on the sleeve; it's hard to shake off the feeling of listening to an unreleased Main Street record. However, only the most aggressively cynical hipster could moan "heard it all before" at what is, in truth, a well-rounded, well-produced EP that fits nicely into Monteith's catalogue of releases, and deserves praise for its strengths.

Deadbeat - Drawn and Quartered (BLKRTZ)

Deadbeat - Drawn and Quartered (BLKRTZ)

Scott Monteith's Deadbeat project finally returns with a full length album, launching his much anticipated new BLKRTZ label. Considering Deadbeat's constant reevaluation of his sound - his career has taken in glitchy dub-scapes, driving techno and some slightly dissapointing hip-hop/dancehall hybrids - there was every possibility that launching his own label could see Monteith indulging in vanity projects and dissapearing swiftly up his own arse. Drawn and Quartered is one of his finest works to date; a sprawling, lush album of deep, textured dub that smothers lurching steppas riddims in the hard-edged white noise of Demdike Stare or Muslimgauze. Divided into five "quarters" (is this right?), the album takes the form of one long-running piece, each movement sequeing seamlessly into the next, forming from a storm of white noise, rising up through rootsy tribal numbers, before peaking in a storm of crunchy dub techno and slowly dissolving into the ether again. With each of the track over eleven minutes long, there's little of the obvious drop/breakdown dynamic, and more of a focus on evolving a wall of sound, allowing delays to build up and synth lines to evolve. The sudden drop from metallic noise into a blaring saxophone in Third Quarter (The Vampire of Mumbai) hits to the bone because of this, and Deadbeat launches into a half-timed loping dub monster full of scatters of vocals, nyabingi-tinged pecurcussion and hefty amounts of delay.

Whilst Drawn and Quartered is far more of a rootsy, dub-based peice than other Monteith works, Second Quarter and Fourth Quarter, both pass through dub-techno territory, the former toying with the 4/4 grove and smothering it in reverb a la early ~scape releases, whilst the latter slowly grows from a mass of white noise into a solid dancefloor monster. It's the gem of the album, with shimmery guitar lines, rattling darbuka and an earth-trembling sub-bass crawling along in the lower frequencies.

An auspicious start for BLKRTZ.

Deadbeat announces BLKRTZ

Scott Monteith, aka Deadbeat, recently announced that he will be launching his own record label, BLKRTZ at the end of June, with the first release being Drawn and Quartered, his seventh studio album following 2008's Roots and Wire. For those who've managed not to notice Deadbeat in the 12 years that he's been producing, the Canadian's earliest works were released on Stefa Betke (Pole) and Barbara Preisenger's ~scape label, and focussed on a grainy, spacious type of dub heavily reminiscent of Pole's own solo excursions. Never staying still, Monteith has released more heavily techno influenced records on labels such as Cynosure and Wagon Repair, as well as exploring deeper avenues of roots dub and dancehall on Journeyman's Annua, and releasing Vampire / Vampire dub, one of my most-played of last year, on Echochord.

Monteith gave the following statement recently about his intentions with BLKRTZ
“When I received the news a few months ago that ~scape was officially closing its doors, I was incredibly sad to hear it (...) Though I hadn’t worked with them in a few years, I always saw ~scape as the natural home for a very important part of my work. Not necessarily the more listening side of things per se, but certainly the most unconcerned with genre or function, from a creative stand point the most free I guess. Barbara and Stefan worked very hard to promote a great deal of quite marginalized material over the years and did a lot to help me and many other artists out personally who otherwise would have had a much harder time of it. Though I’ll be concentrating on my own work for the first few releases, it’s my hope that BLKRTZ can serve a similarly honorable purpose in the years to come.”

I was a massive fan of ~scape's output over the past decade, and their willingness to support often very niche artists (I think I'm probably one of the few people who picked up on how great Cappablack were), so the thought of Monteith following a similar philosophy with BLKRTZ is very exciting. We'll bring more info on the label as we get it, for now, here's an unreleased Deadbeat number via his soundcloud.

Claudette by deadbeat