Deadbeat

Scott Monteith, working under the name Deadbeat, is a Canadian electronic musician and music technology educator whose productions and performances draw from an array of styles grounded in Jamaican dub. Early ties to Montreal’s thriving electronic community led to his initial breakthrough via abstract dub releases, beginning with the 2002 album Wild Life Documentaries on Stefan Betke’s (Pole) respected ~scape imprint. After settling in Berlin during 2006, Monteith shifted greater attention toward live appearances at clubs and festivals across the globe. Later works such as 2008’s Roots and Wire blended dubstep and techno elements, whereas 2011’s Drawn and Quartered stood as an expansive experimental dub statement. Although numerous dancefloor-oriented 12"s appeared throughout the 2010s, most of his decade-spanning full-length projects involved vocal collaborations, among them 2014’s The Infinity Dub Sessions alongside reggae singer Paul St. Hilaire and 2019’s Trinity Thirty with Camara, which reimagined Cowboy Junkies’ The Trinity Session.

Monteith’s origins trace to Kitchener, Ontario; he relocated to Montreal near the close of 1996 and soon immersed himself in the city’s experimental digital music and art circles, later helping establish the multimedia group Covert Ops. Employed by music software firm Applied Acoustic Systems, he launched the Deadbeat project in 1998 and issued his first minimal techno 12"s in 2000. The atmospheric dub-techno album Primordia emerged in 2001 via Mitchell Akiyama’s Intr_version label. Its successor, Wild Life Documentaries, arrived on ~scape the following year, and Monteith also contributed to the 2002 Montreal Smoked Meat compilation on Force Inc. that surveyed the local scene. Alongside Stephen Beaupré he formed the microhouse duo Crackhaus, whose debut It’s a Crackhaus Thing appeared on Onitor in 2003 and was followed by Spells Disaster on Mutek in 2004—both markedly more playful than his solo output.

~scape continued as Deadbeat’s base for 2004’s Something Borrowed, Something Blue and 2005’s New World Observer, the latter adding vocals to his dub-centric approach. Journeyman’s Annual in 2007 extended this direction by folding in dancehall and dubstep influences, while Roots and Wire, issued in 2008 by the Canadian label Wagon Repair, favored a leaner, club-focused aesthetic. A dub-techno mix titled Radio Rothko came out on The Agriculture in 2010.

After ~scape ceased operations, Monteith founded BLKRTZ and placed the 2011 album Drawn and Quartered on the new imprint. The eighth official studio album, simply titled Eight, followed on BLKRTZ in 2012 and featured appearances by Dandy Jack, Mathew Jonson, and Danuel Tate. The Infinity Dub Sessions, a complete joint effort with vocalist Paul St. Hilaire, surfaced in 2014; concurrently, Deadbeat’s first three ~scape full-lengths received remastering and reissue as LPs 2002-2005. Walls & Dimensions, containing contributions from guests including Fink and Howie B, arrived in 2015, with an instrumental edition issued the next year. A 2017 BLKRTZ re-release of Roots and Wire preceded singles such as Our Rotten Roots on Echocord Colour, after which Deadbeat issued the 2018 full-length Wax Poetic for This Our Great Resolve that incorporated spoken-word passages from participants such as Gudrun Gut and Thomas Fehlmann. The straight-ahead dub reggae single “Wail Ball & Cry” appeared soon afterward, and the dub-techno album Waking Life closed the year. In 2019, Monteith and Berlin-based Canadian Camara delivered Trinity Thirty, a complete reinterpretation of Cowboy Junkies’ 1988 album The Trinity Session.