The title of Deadbeat's third album for ~scape, New World Observer, begs the question of perspective. If the artist is an observer bearing witness to a confounding “new world order," what is his or her vantage point? We think of the observer looking down from on high, floating above it all. But with the skies crowded by the US Defense Department's ubiquitous, all-seeing satellites, the critical artist stakes out an alternative position. In Deadbeat's case, he chooses a nautical perspective. 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. (It's no surprise that at MUTEK's Chilean festival in 2004, Deadbeat performed a live set from the back of a moving tugboat, bouncing complex reverberations off the side of a dry dock to a flotilla of listeners bobbing in his wake.)
It would be silly to call this a "political" album, but the record's influences – not to mention Deadbeat's commitment to Montreal's tight-knit music community, and his active membership in a global rave counter-culture – 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 brain-numbing crawl. "I don't know how any artist in any discipline who has been reading the paper or watching the news over the last year could not have countless atrocities penetrate their work," says Monteith. His response isn't intended to define as political such "abstract" electronic music, but by including such sources – as well as the distraught Palestinian woman whose voice ushers in "O Little Town of Bethlehem" – Monteith refutes the idea that electronic music (or pop music, call it what you will) exists in a vacuum.
If Deadbeat's slow-burning anger differentiates New World Observer from his earlier projects – aside from the fact that the new album is his most accomplished attempt yet to fuse dub, techno, and ambient music into a complex, undulating form – the other distinguishing factor here is the presence of vocals. Several tracks benefit from the contributions of Montreal vocalist ATHESIA, a singer with a background in house, bossa nova, and jazz. In contrast to Deadbeat's unambiguous approach to form and content in his sampling of the news media, Athesia's contributions gradually break down over the course of the album from recognizable speech to pure phonetics – suggestive expressions that have become untethered from any definitive referent. On "Ruination”, where Athesia's vocals waver like the fluttering wake of passing thoughts, the dissolution becomes complete. "I treated the vocal sources as I would any other element," says Monteith”, and it was a very long, baby-steps journey for me – unlike anything else I've ever tackled." The album lays bare that journey, just as each individual track shines forth a sea-borne beacon indicating further potentialities, further directions. Pull out your compass and survey the world from Deadbeat's perspective.
