Purveyor of: dubbed-out beats from this turntablist trickster
File next to: John Cage, King Tubby, DJ Shadow, Kid Koala, Tim Hecker
Playing #WL13 Thursday, February 14th @ The Shop under Parts & Labour

Cheldon Paterson has performed under a number of monikers and as one half of turntable duo iNSiDEaMiND. He’s made regular appearances at Wavelength events over the years and has offered us a helping hand behind the scenes on many occasions. Our own Kevin Parnell caught up with Cheldon to talk about his career so far and
his most recent project, SlowPitch.

Can you tell us a bit about the evolution of your turntable work/approach/style, from InsideAMind to Professor Fingers and now SlowPitch?

I started DJing outside of my bedroom back in ‘98 and ran a successful weekly at the now defunct Down One Lounge at the corner of Front and Church Street. In 2003, I found myself getting tired of playing other people’s music and became interested in producing my own. Around this time I co-founded iNSiDEaMiND, which was basically a hybrid of DJ/live band/turntablism. Professor Fingers (ProEf) was me launching my solo career, developing what I had learned from iNSiDEaMiND’s experimentation, including a newfound passion for performance art and carving out my own style. SlowPitch is who I am today, very comfortable around my tools and still learning. I'd say at this point I'm a mix of Kraftwerk, King Tubby and John Cage. I'm a sci-fi turntablist/performer/producer.

In your work as SlowPitch, there's an element of “public education” on the turntable as an instrument and the “DJ” as a musician, and you've been involved with the Off Centre DJ School since its inception. What draws you to this sort of outreach, why is that important to you as an artist?

The Off Centre DJ School is one of the only places in Toronto that is dedicated to teaching the fundamentals of DJing/turntablism and the many possibilities of the art. I believe that rare things need explaining and what I do definitely fits the bill. Different settings of course call for different approaches, but all of my performances display some sort of clarification as to what is taking place, even through movements and gestures. I think it's important in a live performance setting for the audience to have some kind of connection with the artist(s). I enjoy watching a live band and seeing where the sounds are coming from. An educated audience appreciates the difficulty level involved in performing live.
I suppose it's also a great way to see where your hard-earned cash is going. Call me old school!

Does your approach to the turntable and music creation change from working on solo projects or in collaborative partnerships like iNSiDEaMiND or GuSHee?

With each project I have different responsibilities. For instance, with iNSiDEaMiND, my partner Steptone and I share lead during our improvisation; sometimes I'll focus on rhythms and other times on sounds. With GuSHee, I'm on beat duty for the most part while Pursuit Grooves holds down vocals and synth. The turntable and my style and approach to scratching remain present. It's the root for me.

DJ/turntable culture is an area of music that Wavelength only occasionally treads into. What's the current state of this genre and culture in Toronto and where do you see it going, locally and/or on a global scale?

DJ culture is alive and well as far as I know. There's an enormous amount of music being made and with today's technology pretty much anyone can do it. You don't even have to know how to mix... there's a button for that and that's a whole other story. According to some recent statistics, vinyl record sales have been going up and I do see more turntables being sold around Toronto. The genre of turntablism however has drastically dropped into obscurity since the arrival of laptop DJ programs and controllers, I'd say around 2006. On a global scale there are a handful of other artists including P-love, DJ Sniff and Kid Koala reinventing the art form and taking the turntable to new heights. Just to be clear, I'm not just talking about scratching up a storm over beats, but really taking new approaches to the art.

What's next for SlowPitch and/or other projects you might be working on?

I'm currently working on some new iNSiDEaMiND material as well as an exciting new audio-visual performance alongside visual artist Wifihifiscifi to support my soon-to-be-released album Emoralis on Montreal/Switzerland-based label Phonosaurus Records.