Depeche Mode, Goldfrapp, the Rapture, Tracey Thorn: Ewan Pearson has been courted by a rather mainstream client list for a guy knee-deep in the underground. For nearly a decade, Pearson has lent his considerable talents as a producer to both crossover dance-rock stars and folks who predate the rave era entirely. Perhaps these musicians, who live between pop and club life, are drawn to someone who gushes over Radiohead and St. Vincent as well as Âme and Radio Slave, someone with an up-to-the-minute knowledge of dance trends as well as an understanding of what makes trad songwriting tick.
So it makes sense that Pearson's released his latest mix CD on Kompakt, a label that's spent the last 12 years turning avant dance music into a kind of pseudo-pop, and vice versa. During the first wave of microhouse, which it helped pioneer, Kompakt also released cheeky Madonna interpolations and chanteuse-techno hybrids that verged on outright tweeness. And as minimal techno's deep-underground hit a fallow patch mid-decade, Kompakt remained friendly enough to attract the attention of both Spin magazine and the Pet Shop Boys, among thousands of others.
Much of Pearson's We Are Proud of Our Choices hearkens back to the label's earliest days, its micro-era clicking and snapping, while retaining at least a flicker of that now near-mythical Kompakt glow. A_Idric's "Birds on Tree" pairs the melancholy of Gas' string samples with scissor-sharp percussion. Wah Chu Ku's "T Times Too" recalls a more minimal Plaid, its cool-breeze synth gusting over stiff house drums.
But Pearson's tracklist also eschews both songs and pop remixes, the two choices that still guarantee a look-in from an audience with limited time for instrumental techno. Vocals surface mostly as ghostly shudders and robotic punctuation on tracks like Hot Natured's "Equilibrium" and Xenia Beliayeva's downright spooky "Analog Effekt". Perhaps true to his nature as a regularly gigging DJ, Pearson affirms himself as a drums man here, a fan of gleaming Euro-techno snares, static-ridden electro kicks, deep house woodblocks, and beyond. Pearson manages to choreograph rhythms of all sorts-- both rigid and fluid, ugly and beautiful, straight banging and downright delicate-- into one slowly unfolding dance.
Pearson's range isn't surprising; Choices is now the third mix to show off his enviably wide-eared listening habits. Perhaps that's why, if We Are Proud of Our Choices is occasionally dark, it's also never alienating or pointlessly sparse. A sensualist rather than an acetic technician, Pearson expertly juggles the astringent and the voluptuous, even when we're just talking drum sounds. None of the tracks leap out on first listen as obvious show-stoppers, but Pearson's nonetheless collected the most rhythmically diverse selection of tracks to appear on a Kompakt-branded mix in quite some time. We're lucky to have him, out there patrolling the border between hard and soft, rhythmic experiment and low-key pleasure, pop and underground.
