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Kicking it homestyle >>
Micro 3 offers a taste of Montreal Smoked Meat
Mirror:
The description of Crack Haus in the liner notes is pretty weird and
abstract. Steve Beaupré:
The whole thing is just weird and abstract from the beginning but it’s
exactly what it is, cracking house, “haus” from the German
because we’re greatly influenced by German minimal techno. M: How about
the drug angle? SB: It’s
mainly metaphorical, but we used to live together in kind of a crackhouse
loft. M: So what
led you guys to this point, what’s your musical background? SB: I started
DJing about five years ago in Ottawa, where I grew up, and I moved here
almost two years ago and got into producing. Like Scott, I started solo
with micro-house combined with techno and found sounds. I also took
recorder lessons when I was six. M: And Scott,
after leaving the Ontario rave scene, how did Deadbeat develop? SM: At first,
my focus was on really stripped, minimal techno, simple but shuffling,
touchy, percussive stuff. Through Mutek and FCMM, I got exposed to dub-influenced
Berlin techno, which has severely tainted what I’m working on now.
One of the nicest things about Crack Haus is, whereas I concentrate
on ambient, ethereal, dubby listening music on my own, I still have
this outlet for fucked-up dancefloor stuff. M: How did
Crack Haus get rolling? SM: The
two factors that kick-started it were that myself, Steve, Marc Akufen
and Vincent Lemieux had been talking about doing our own label, which
is gonna get going this year, called Risqué Music. It’s
a forum for more abstract, screwed-up found sounds as opposed to standard
synth drums, but still in an approachable house format, incorporating
all this crap noise but remaining funky and friendly for the dancefloor.
So that prompted us to get to work and when Force Inc. needed more artists
and more tracks for this compilation, it was the perfect springboard.
M: So how
’bout this Montreal scene? SB: It’s
just blown up, it’s incredible. I think Montreal has a very defined
sound. There are influences, obviously, but the style has developed
isolated from everything else, veering away from the old formats of
techno and house. SM: It’s really begun to take form on a public level to the point where it’s become as much a part of the city’s music scene as anything else. Mutek is probably one of the most important electronic music festivals in the world now, and it’s so exciting to see the community grow. : At Micro 3 at SAT on Friday, Feb. 15, 9pm, $15
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Montreal’s
minimal techno network reaches full bloom this week with the launch
of Montreal Smoked Meat, a sampler of our city’s finest on the
MTL-via-Frankfurt label Force Inc. The Micro 3 event will showcase many
of the artists featured on said disc, such as familiar sounds (if not
faces) Jetone, Mitchell Akiyama and Mateo Murphy, along with relative
newcomers Steve Beaupré and Scott Monteith (aka Deadbeat), who
appear on the comp separately and united as Crack Haus. The Mirror spoke
to the tweaky two about all this “crap noise.”