Musician and urbexer switches locales
Dead-Drop’s latest news isn’t a new musical release or new exploration. The music producer and urbexer has relocated from England to Germany.
For an explorer of Dead-Drop’s ilk, such a move holds great appeal.
“Every single time I’ve visited, I’ve come back just feeling like I miss the place,” he said. “No motivation or interest to go out here (UK) or see anything new or explore any places. Just dreaming of going back to Germany and all the vast military things and infrastructure. It’s just so much that there is to explore. It’s such a huge country.”
Dead-Drop knew it was time to expand his horizons.
“It’s weird,” he said. “I’d never been abroad and never left the UK when I was young. The first time I ever went on a plane was when I went to Lithuania. I’d never left the island. You don’t realize how trapped you are until you escape it. Just visiting there multiple times, going back, I didn’t want to come back to the UK. There’s multiple reasons why I ended up going there, but ultimately it’s where I feel like I belong at this point, or where I feel like life should take me somewhere different. I’ve been stuck here for so long doing the same routine. I had the same job for nearly 14 years, same routine, never changed. It’s common for people to pack up a life and move somewhere else at least in places, not the UK, it seems to be common for people to stay where they are, stay in the very same town and never move and never experience anything new. I felt like I probably should just do it. It took a long, long process to get everything in order. I had to learn basics of German, so I had to pass an exam to be able to get the visa accepted and everything. My Deutsche is nicht good, but I’m practicing. I’m learning and, thankfully, I have friends there. I have contacts there. I’m not alone. The opportunity arose. I managed to make it happen.”
Dead-Drop isn’t just going to reside in Germany.
“I’m going to get a residence permit,” he said. “I’ve got to get three of those. I’ve got to get them every two years for five years until I become a citizen, so there’s still a lot more to be done. Unfortunately, that’s because the UK left the EU (European Union). I didn’t vote for that. I would have preferred to stay in the EU. Because we left the EU, I had to jump through all these hoops just to move there, but made it happen. It gives me so much more excitement to go out and do things and explore again. It’s going to be nice to be out of the cycle and do something new.”
Dead-Drop will be able to retain his UK citizenship as well.
“Luckily, Germany only a few years ago allowed dual citizenship,” he said. “The UK has always allowed dual citizenship. So I can keep my UK citizenship, acquire German citizenship, have dual passports and essentially have the most powerful passport combination in the world and be able to go anywhere I ever want to go.”
Being British also helps Dead-Drop in his new environs.
“I have found it’s been quite a bit helpful being English because English is one of the languages most used,” he said. “Many Germans speak English. So when I get into a tough situation, I can always revert and say: ‘entschuldigung sprechen sie Englisch.’ It’s got me out of a lot of situations and people are very understanding that I’m still learning. It definitely helps being English because I think the majority of people that move to Germany are. I’m fortunate in a sense that I can revert back to a language that other people can still speak.”
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Knowing people in Deutschland also helped Dead-Drop.
“It’s good to have contacts,” he said. “I know people in Germany so they’re able to sort stuff out for me. All the appointments are never-ending. Until you go through it, you don’t understand how much there actually is to do. It’s constantly sending in paperwork and paperwork and you’ve got to wait weeks and weeks for responses. You can’t get it done within a week and that’s it. I’m off of moving now. It’s taken almost two years for the better part. It’s like get everything done and finalized and it’s still not done. I’ve still got another five years to become a citizen and have the move be complete if everything works out.”
Living in Western Europe enables Dead-Drop to visit many locales without his feet leaving the ground.
“Where your imagination and where you’re willing to travel is the limit,” he said. “Another thing to look forward to German citizenship is because I’m back in the European Union then. I can travel anywhere within Europe without having to apply for a visa or anything. It’s cross borders easily. So that’s going to be nice to be able to do that, just travel and not have any thoughts like, I need to apply for this visa, I need to get this stamp, I need to go into this queue.”
Although Dead-Drop has many urbex fans, music has always been his primary pursuit.
“A lot of people get confused about what I do or what I do primarily,” he said. “Music has always been my passion since I started my channel since I was 16, 17, and I’m 31 now. I’ve been at it a long time, making music, just dabbling, teaching myself. I thought I’d share my creations online and thought probably nothing’s ever going to come of it. No one’s going to really listen to some crappy music made by a teenager on his laptop. But lo and behold, people actually cared and actually liked it. I slowly but surely gathered a very small audience of a couple of hundred people. But it was pretty insane that anyone even cared about it.”
Dead-Drop later caught the urbex bug.
“I’ve lost track of actually how long ago I first saw this video,” he said. “But I was on Facebook of all places, and I saw a video going viral of some Russian guys climbing up the arm of a bridge onto the top. It looked insane. It was filmed with the GoPro POV and I’d never seen anything like this before. I thought, oh, let’s delve into this. Then that opened it up to parkour, urbex, everything like that. And I thought, I can do this, too. Why not? Another hobby which I added to the collection. I thought not many people are recording these kind of videos, I might as well do it, share my version. And people seem to enjoy those as well.”
Dead-Drop represented Western Europe in an activity populated with Eastern Europeans.
“Weirdly, I got into a small community with Shiey, Desmond, Altair (Scorpio), Checkmate,” he said. “Somehow, some random northern guy from England got brought into this group of Lithuanians. It just continued from there. I met so many people and began going further into urbex. Because that’s what got me the most notoriety, most people seem to think that’s my priority, that’s my main thing. But it’s actually the other way around. It began with music. That’s how I started. That’s how it’ll always be. I’m a musician first. People come in and expecting urbex are going to get disappointed when it’s not there because I got so many comments like when’s the next climb? Are you going to climb another chimney? Are you going to do this? And I was like, well, yeah, when I want to. It’s not my thing. I just do it for the fun. So it’s always been a bit of a tricky thing to keep music the focus.”
To read more about Dead-Drop, check out gridnews.net: https://www.gridnews.net/profiles/musician-and-urbexer-switches-locales
Dead-Drop’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/DeadDrop420
Dead-Drop’s website: https://dead-drop.co.uk/
The Grid’s first profile on Dead-Drop: https://www.gridnews.net/profiles/british-music-creator-also-into-urbex?rq=dead-drop
