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EWAN PEARSON
BORN
I was born in Kidderminster in Worcestershire in 1972, the first of April. I lived there for the first eighteen years of my life, and then headed off to college.
FAMILY
Music`s always been a big part of my family life. My Dad plays guitar as a hobby; he`d been in bands since he was a kid, he was in a folk group and pub-rock bands when I was younger. In fact, I played keyboards in my Dad`s rock band when I was a teenager for about half a... Read moreEWAN PEARSON BORN
I was born in Kidderminster in Worcestershire in 1972, the first of April. I lived there for the first eighteen years of my life, and then headed off to college.
FAMILY
Music`s always been a big part of my family life. My Dad plays guitar as a hobby; he`d been in bands since he was a kid, he was in a folk group and pub-rock bands when I was younger. In fact, I played keyboards in my Dad`s rock band when I was a teenager for about half a year. Although she doesn`t play my Mum`s always been a big music fan. She left home and moved down to London when she was seventeen; she was really into jazz and reggae and used to go to Blues parties and stuff like that. If she`d have grown up 20 years later, I think my Mum would have been at Schoom - she would have been into Acid House. My Mum`s always had really good musical taste actually, she`s always playing me stuff; we`re always swapping recommendations and CDs back and forwards. They`re great, they`ve always been very supportive of me doing music. There were concerns that I was always going to be broke, but they`ve always been very encouraging.
MUSICAL ROOTS
I had piano lessons whilst I was a kid. My younger sister started having lessons so I wanted to have lessons as well. I played cello whilst I was at school too, but I got fed up of carrying it around! Also it`s really hard to get a good sound out of it on your own; I used to enjoy playing it with an orchestra, but with piano you can make a fuller sound by yourself. I was always fascinated with electronics and synths. A friend of my Dad bought an old Yamaha mono-synth and I remember he lent it to us. I got a little Casio when I was 13, 14 years old and just started building from there.
FIRST PROJECTS
I went to University, doing an English degree at Cambridge. Then I took a year off and made a record for a Birmingham indie label, Bosting, when I was 22. Then I went back to University and that`s when I moved down to London, I went to Royal Holloway to do a Masters degree. I was kind of basically doing this dual school/music thing; although I`d been doing music as a hobby since I was a kid, I always thought though that I was going to teach, I even started doing a PhD and really thought I was going to be an academic. Music just gradually took over; I realised I couldn`t do both. I`d been given a British Academy grant to do my PhD so my fees were paid and I had seven grand to live on a year. I did a year of that but felt so guilty that I wasn`t doing enough work that I stopped it. Then I tried being a self-employed musician, so I went through 5 years of being absolutely stone-broke and thinking, `Why am I doing this?` and my friends all asking, `What are you doing?` You know, I nearly jacked it in actually when I was about 28, but then a couple of remixes did well, and it just gradually built momentum and finally it`s now turned into a proper job!
I made a couple of singles for this label in Birmingham, but when I made an EP with a bit more deep housey, techno-ey feel, it wasn`t their kind of thing. I ended up going to a friend`s party in Glasgow one night and somebody suggested I play it to Soma. I rang the office up and asked if I could drop a tape in. This EP was recorded by Richard Brown, a guy from Wakefield who went on to be Swag with Chris Duckenfield, and he vaguely knew Soma. I was just picking names out of the air that they might know and might get me into the office, and it worked. So I went in and met Dave Clarke, played him the tracks, went down to Slam that night, and three days later I got a called from Orde Meikle saying they loved it and wanted to put it out. I was absolutely made up! Then two weeks later they asked if I`d ever thought about making an album. I`d never actually thought about myself making a record like that, so that`s when my horizons started opening up.
DJING
I bought a Technics at college and a mate of mine had one, so we used to get together and try to DJ. I started buying records when I was at college and there was a little scene out in Cambridge, there wasn`t really anything at the University but we used to go out to these parties on the outside of town. We used to go buy Balearic records, that sort of thing, from London and we used to travel to places like Leeds and Nottingham, clubs like Back To Basics and Venus. That`s when I started clubbing in earnest and that was also when I started playing - though just for fun. When I was on Soma I used to take a drum machine out with me, and play the Maas stuff live. I used to go out with Funk D`Void and the Slam boys and played all over Europe. Though we had a lot of fun, I got a bit bored of it after a while. Nowadays you`ve got programs like Ableton, and it`s a lot more flexible - you can do a lot more, improvise a lot more. I wish I had that set up at the time, it would`ve been more enjoyable to play live. When I made “Small Change,” a compilation album of remixes for Soma, I decided that I would try DJing to do the promotional side of things and I was really rubbish to start with - really rubbish and really nervous. Again, I had no plans to be a professional DJ, I was just doing a bit of promotion and it gathered its own momentum and, 6 years later, to be playing places like fabric and Space in Ibiza and doing CDs for fabric – it`s great, but I can`t quite work out how it happened.
What interests me is finding exciting new records in different styles. It`s that sensibility of trying to twist things slightly, trying to put things together in not such an obvious way, trying to mix things up style-wise. I don`t like hearing hours of the same sub-genre. It bores me when everyone is doing the same thing. I just find the stuff that moves me in whatever area and try and make it work. The people that inspire me are people like Andrew Weatherall and my immediate peers, people who have come through with me, people like Ivan Smagghe who aren`t content to just do one thing and let the money roll in or play what everyone else is playing but wander off in search of something else. My DJ career really started to develop through finding and listening to people that are like-minded; like Andrew, like Ivan, like the Schwarzes actually, Ali and Basti, like Ata, like Michael Meyer; people who are always very musical and don`t blindly follow the prevailing mood of the time.
LABELS & PRODUCTION
When people ask me `So you`re a DJ?` I`m like, `Well, sort of, it`s like my fourth or fifth job.` Producing and making music is supposed to be my proper job, I started off as an artist. I didn`t have any training; I had some musical training as a kid, but I learnt how to program a computer and how to program synths on my own. Like most people, you just learn it by doing it. Then I did my records for Soma in `97-`98, an album and a few singles. I was meant to do a second record for them, but I started doing a lot of remixes and the remixing was going well. I kind of realised that I was enjoying stepping back a bit, and I wasn`t enjoying the artist thing. I was getting enough creative satisfaction out of the remixing. And being let loose on people`s records has led to producing where I`m involved from the start, rather than being brought in later on. I`ve remixed Depeche Mode, Goldfrapp, the Chemical Brothers, Pet Shop Boys; I`ve remixed a lot of artists that I really like. For me, remixing, when it`s done well, is an art form in its own right. My attitude is to treat it as reproduction. A great remix doesn`t throw away all of the original track and is sensitive to the song. And in the last few years there`s been so much good work like that. I really do think that in the last three or four years, we`ve gone through a renaissance with people like Erol , like the DFA and Lindstrom doing all this really musical work and making it a little bit more out there and what they all have in common is a disco sensibility. Remixing started with disco, and there was the kind of heyday in the late 80`s, early 90`s with Weatherall, then for much of the 90`s it became really uninspiring – boring dubs and things. But now at the moment, it just feels like this space has opened up for us to be more creative again, and even a little bit self-indulgent in a good way. I`ve done three remixes for Goldfrapp now. The last remix I did, for the single `Ride A White Horse,` was 15 minutes long, had five sections and I thought, `They`re never going to go for this, never in a million years!` They took it and didn`t change a thing. I don`t know how long this will last but for now we should make the most it.
How was it working on the Rapture`s latest record?
It was great. I was a bit nervous - I`d done little bits of producing before but not anything on this scale. There was the sense that `Echoes` had been such a well-received record and then there had been a long wait, so people had really high expectations for the next record. So a little bit of pressure was on. I wasn`t sure who I was going to be doing it with, various people were mooted but what the band wanted, which was me and Paul Epworth, finally happened. I`ve been such a fan of his, with Bloc Party and Maximo Park, and it was great; we got on like a house on fire and became really good mates. He was very generous. I would do some tracking and he did some tracking; there was no sort of set or delineated roles. Obviously he has a lot more experience in engineering and he worked at Air studios, he came from the more traditional route. Whereas he knows how to mic a drum kit and make it sound incredible and I`m only learning that stuff, slowly. It was intense and really hard work but a great experience and I`m really proud of what we accomplished, so hopefully we`re going to do something else.
FABRIC
When did I play my first gigs for you? I suppose it was when I was still in London in 2003 I think - just prior to me moving to Berlin, when things started to click and the remixes really started to get going. I was playing out a lot in London and playing parties like Secret Sundaze, things were going well and that`s when I got my first invitation to play here. I love Room 1, I just feel really comfortable there, it just works. I was very nervous the first time I played, but it`s just always good. I`ve had a really couple of amazing gigs here. I remember filling in for Ali and Basti about a year and a half ago; I had to move up to the last slot. It was intense having to step into their shoes, but then it was 8.30 in the morning and Room 1 was still packed and nobody wanted to go home. I think my favourite moment was when I played New Year`s Eve the year before last and had to DJ across midnight. By complete and utter fluke a breakdown in the track I was playing ended just as the countdown finished and as the clock struck 12 the kick-drum came in. Judy came up to me and said “how the hell did you do that?” I couldn`t have done it on purpose if I`d have practised for weeks! The best thing is fabric`s run by people who are genuinely passionate, obsessed and enthusiastic; you`ll be in the DJ booth playing and there`s the sound guy going out and adjusting the crossovers on the PA out on the dance floor, and by the end of the night half the staff are there dancing too.
THE MIX
It ranges through quite a few styles but I think it`s a no-nonsense dancefloor mix, quite heads-down, low-slung basslines. I was a bit nervous because I did a Resident Advisor mix last year that was very musical which people really loved and I wasn`t sure how I`d follow that, even it was always meant as a more of an after-hours listening thing. I think this is a lot more down and dirty and it`s very deliberately supposed to give you a taste of what you`d hear me play in Room 1 on a Saturday or in Robert Johnson or in Panoramabar, places like that. Most of the records on there are well and truly road-tested, stuff that I know works together. I`m doing a lot more mixing in-key these days; it`s my producer head I guess, I`m always trying to find things that fit together - I like that happy accident that you find sometimes when you find two records that are in the same key and the same tempo; when you put them together, you make this brand new thing. In fact the last two tracks on the compilation are run together for their entirety which is fun although it takes some concentration when you do it in a club, I can tell you.
THE FUTURE
I`m in the middle of producing the new album from this French band M83, their third record I think. I`m co-producing that with a guy called Ken Thomas who`s kind of an independent production legend who did lots of post-punk stuff and industrial and produced all of Sigur Ros` albums. So that`s the next course at producer school for me. I just did half of the Tracey Thorn solo album, that came out in April and the first single “It`s All True” I co-wrote. So I`m trying to push the production thing on and will be flat out in the studio `til July and then it will be DJing during the summer and trying to get some of my own stuff done too. I`m recording for Kompakt now with Al Usher under the name Partial Arts so I`m an artist again too, I suppose. Just trying to manage all the different things, and switching from one to the other. They`re mutually beneficial and the DJing is nice because it means I can be more picky about the work that I do as a producer. Hopefully, it`s all fitting together quite nicely.[/size] Show less
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