Deadbeat - New World Observer

~scape

Third Album for scape by the legendary Deadbeat. The open seas - the pirates' domain - have long been a site of resistance. And if reggae, one of the world's great resistance genres, is an island ghetto music, dub is ocean song, brimming with tidal swells and pinging with the secret language of sonar. These freedoms are turned loose in the music of Deadbeat, aka Montreal's Scott Monteith. Equally influenced by German techno, dub reggae, and the digital dub of his mentor Pole, Deadbeat plumbs the unfathomable aquatic mass of the deep blue in his bottom-dredging bass lines, coral-clacking clicks, and untethered melodies. Deadbeat's third album for Scape, New World Observer, is his most accomplished attempt yet to fuse dub, techno, and ambient music into a complex, undulating form. It would be silly to call this a 'political' album, but the record's influences demonstrate how the tenor of the times filters into music that might at first listen be deemed a product for leisure consumption. If you listen closely to the introduction of "Abu Ghraib," you'll hear the appalling rhetoric of a certain North American right-wing radio announcer slowed to a brainnumbing crawl. in AB-CD


It’s interesting to see how purveyors of broken dubwise minimalism have tried to diversify their sound over the last couple of years. In thrall to the prototypes of Basic Channel and, later, their rhythm and sound incarnation, the sound reached a cultural climax with the release of Pole’s seminal first album back in 1998.From there on this generic microcosm unfurled at an exponential rate, bringing to the world the House modifications of Kit Clayton and his Belief Systems, the Scape imprint and a seemingly unstoppable roster of producers guided by the presets and configurations perfected by their master. As the scene has progressed these new diversifications have been necessary to keep the movement, well, moving, something quite evidently at the forefront of Scott Monteith's thinking cap while recording this excellent new album. in Boomkat