Toronto’s SlowPitchSound tells stories through his sci-fi turntablism

At Vancouver New Music, Cheldon Paterson’s uncategorizable music fuses his love for nature with his taste for obscure sound

By John Lucas

SlowPitchSound.

Vancouver New Music presents SlowPitchSound at the Annex on May 10 at 8 pm, with an artist talk at 7:15 pm

THERE MAY BE A turntable and a mixer on the stage, but make no mistake about it: a SlowPitchSound performance is not a DJ set in any traditional sense.

The artist otherwise known as Cheldon Paterson uses many of the techniques that hip-hop turntablists employ, including scratching and playing with speed and pitch, but his approach to his craft is very much his own. 

“The root for me is turntablism; it’s definitely mastering the art of manipulating records on the turntable, but it goes way further than that for me,” Paterson says when Stir reaches him at home in Toronto.

The music that Paterson makes as SlowPitchSound is impossible to categorize, and is ever-evolving. Among his influences he cites Boards of Canada, Björk, Kid Koala, and DJ Krush—artists whose music is sufficiently idiosyncratic and original that they are practically genres unto themselves.

SlowPitchSound’s 2023 EP, The Reality Is Depth, sounds a bit like a ’90s trip-hop record spinning in a deep-sea cavern, with the opening track “Rising Tide” built on echoing breakbeats and an oceanic drone. Paterson’s latest release, platter.pus, is more akin to a sonic collage, with birdsong and other natural sounds merging with harder-edged urban noises and only occasionally coalescing into head-bobbing passages of downtempo rhythm.

The idea at the heart of turntablism is, of course, that the turntable itself is a musical instrument, and Paterson takes this notion literally, sometimes touching the stylus with his fingers to generate sounds and sometimes tapping the platter.

When he does put some vinyl on, it’s usually one of his obscure thrift-store finds, or one particular record that you won’t find in the bins at your local Value Village, or anywhere else outside of Paterson’s own collection.

“I have a friend in Montreal who has a lathe and presses limited runs of vinyl,” he notes. “I put together a piece of vinyl that has my sounds on it—there are some rare samples that I’ve collected, some drum sounds, and some field recordings on there.” 

When Paterson brings all of these disparate sources together, a sort of arcane alchemy seems to take place, but he has no interest in keeping his methods shrouded in secrecy. His performances usually include a live video component, allowing the audience to see exactly what he’s doing.

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“I think gear can be a bit intimidating for people who aren’t around it a lot or just aren’t familiar with electronics and things like that,” Paterson says. “If I were to just be up onstage—especially with the work that I do that involves a lot of sampling on the fly, looping, and scratching—it can get pretty technical, so if you don’t have a good view of what’s happening, you really don’t know what’s going on onstage. Because it’s something I’ve worked so long at and practised so much, I want to show it. I want people to be really connected with it.”

Unsurprisingly, then, Paterson has no reticence when it comes to discussing the particulars of his stage rig.

“Instead of two, which is what I would be using if I was deejaying at a club or something back in the day, I use one turntable,” he reveals. “And I have a mixer that I’ve been using for a very long time, so I’m very comfortable with it. And then I use what’s called a Kaoss Pad; it’s like a synthesizer/looper. I can also loop in four channels or four banks. And then I use a sampler, like a drum machine. It’s a small drum machine where I’ll have different one-shot sounds or some drum sounds and things like that, and loops. And that’s pretty much it.”

Paterson is loath to assign a genre to what he does, but he has coined his own term for his modus operandi: sci-fi turntablism.

“There’s poems, there’s haikus, there’s so many forms to tell a story, and this is just another way of having an idea of where you want to take people.”

“What I like about sci-fi is that it’s very imaginative, it’s about having a thought and just going there, building this weird world that you’ve been dreaming about in your head,” he says. “I think of, like, Star Wars—these big epic sci-fi films and how when I watch them I’m always blown away with how that came from somebody’s mind, whether it started from a novel or something.”

That might evoke a galaxy far, far away, but the show that SlowPitchSound will be presenting in Vancouver is much more down to earth. Inspired by Paterson’s love of nature, Within Touch uses sound to tell a story exploring the critical importance of protecting the environment.

“Storytelling can take so many different shapes and forms,” says Paterson, who notes that Within Touch is not intended as a linear narrative. “Just getting to know your tool, your instrument, whatever it is—whether you’re painting or whatever—when you have a good grasp on that, when you’re comfortable with it, then you can start to use that to share a message. There’s poems, there’s haikus, there’s so many forms to tell a story, and this is just another way of having an idea of where you want to take people. Then it’s just about figuring out which pieces to put in there to help guide them.”

Paterson has clearly mastered his own instrument of choice, but he acknowledges that he had to overcome a few challenges—both technical and mental—to get there.

“When I first started using the turntable, it was such an intimidating thing,” he admits. “It’s this heavy thing, it spins, the needle is so delicate, all these things. But now it’s not even a second thought. I just feel like this is where I speak, and it’s a beautiful thing to get to that place.”

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