It's extra special when you can have both, but I'll take "good" over "original" any day. Last year, Montreal's Scott Monteith, who records as Deadbeat, released Wildlife Documentaries. Solid record, but the extreme influence of Stefan Betke (aka Pole) was what stood out most. Deadbeat adopted the glitched-out dub and ghosted synths wholesale, without adding much of his own personality to the mix-- and the fact that Wildlife Documentaries was released on Betke's ~scape made the similarities that much more glaring.
Now Deadbeat returns in collaboration with fellow Montreal resident Stephen Beaupré to make "crackhaus" for Stuttgart's Onitor label. Catchy new genre name, to be sure, but it wasn't necessary: The two claim to have been "inspired" by Akufen (Marc Leclair from, yes, Montreal), and in fact, they're working completely in the realm of what Leclair called "microsampling." The Montreal crew share a technique, processing tiny fragments of sound into bubbling, funky, minimal house music. Akufen pulled his material from the radio exclusively on My Way, where the Crackheadz use additional sound sources a la Matthew Herbert, another acknowledged inspiration. House producer Todd Edwards predated all these guys with this business, for those keeping score at home.
So originality is out, but that's all right. Monteith and Beaupré are completely open about where their ideas come from, and most important, they do great things with them. To my ears, It's a Crackhaus Thing beats the pants off the enjoyable but overrated My Way and dances happily away with Leclair's trousers on its head. The key for Monteith and Beaupré is their restraint with their samples. They keep their sequences short and simple, playing up the hook when it's there and letting it slink to the background when it's not. And then throughout, their massively satisfying basslines pick up the slack. Their approach to sound, despite the glitches, is clean and welcoming. All the sharp digital edges have been sanded out to allow more room for movement. And there should be movement.
Though house is the centerpoint, there are twists to the beats. "Shine Your Light", which builds a riff from a sampled gospel moan and a harmonica blast, has a pogo effect on the upbeat that gives the 4/4 beat a bit more bounce. "Little Cosmonaut" and "Single.mtl" organize the tiny sound hacks (percussive taps, half-syllables, a doorslam) into a loping gait, a sort of rounded shuffle under and around the bass drum, all bolstered by the snaking bass. Like Herbert, Monteith and Beaupré have a skill for turning the everyday noise into funky percussion that blends with the soundfield of the individual track. So when a squeaky motor is sampled and looped to form the beat for "Who Says", it doesn't draw attention to itself. It sounds like the right instrument for the rhythm, not some shoehorned fragment that sounded too cool not to be used somewhere.
Monteith and Beaupré know their strengths with Crackhaus and play to them. There are no extended builds here, no allusions to a peak they cannot reach; rather, the nine tracks range from 5\xBD to 7\xBD minutes, just long enough to let the groove build but never outstaying their welcome. If the dynamic range is a bit flat, this accentuates the functional nature of this physical music, where emotion is muted in favor of more reptilian pleasures. Here on my rock it feels as good as the morning sun.
