When asked recently to name five records important to him, experimental composer Chris Madak (who often works as Bee Mask) included "Clutch", a clattering track by Pearson Sound (aka David Kennedy) that sounds as if someone mapped a drum machine onto a Rubik's Cube. "I just have a straightforwardly lizard-brained...'whoa…KILLER' reaction to hearing David’s rhythmic chops going off," Madak said, going on to note that watching DJs slip the tune into a set "was like watching someone execute a really hair-raising parallel parking job in one shot." Therein lies the thrilling paradox in Kennedy's dance productions: they are inscrutable, bordering on the avant-garde, and yet still provoke primal, dunderheaded glee. We're all still cavemen bashing sticks and rocks together, but one caveman taught himself polyrhythms.
Kennedy has honed his highly rhythmic style over the course of a dozen-plus singles as Pearson Sound, most productively since he dropped his Ramadanman title in 2011. He's done so as one of the UK's most adventurous DJs and as co-head (with Ben UFO and Pangaea) of London's Hessle Audio label, whose sparse release schedule has proved mostly bulletproof. (The label's weekly Thursday broadcast on Rinse FM, largely helmed by Ben UFO, is vital listening for fans of underground electronic music.) But whereas Kennedy's peers have cobbled together styles from house, techno, grime, and the remains of dubstep—and therefore tread in the middle of some Venn diagram or another—Kennedy's work seems to exist at a single nexus point, fully discrete, tangential to his surroundings.
Pearson Sound is the long awaited debut album: nine terse, often brutish rhythm tracks laid out end-to-end, because ambient interludes and extended outros are for mama's boys and DJs, respectively. Kennedy's compositions consist chiefly of drums, most recognizable as such, and so the experience of listening to nine tracks in a row is not unlike having some dental work done under local anaesthetic—there's lots of painless drilling, popping, and clicking, perhaps some tingling. About 40 minutes later, it's over.
Pearson Sound re-calcifies Kennedy's aesthetic after recent releases saw him dip his toes into tonal arpeggios and gummy grime melodies. His tracks are economical and athletic, prizing both strength and dexterity. This is borne out in tracks such as "Glass Eye", which doesn't seek to bash but dizzy, and does so with a paucity of elements: just some shivering snares and a liquid string figure.
Kennedy twists his drums just so, playing with dub and house conventions. His snares aren't treated with delay so much as suspended in gelatin, left to quiver, quiver, quiver until finding a state of rest. He's adept at using tonal percussion, crafting melodies from toms and congas the way some producers use pianos. Opener "Asphalt Sparkle" features what is either a hi-hat playing 16th notes or a chain being slowly pulled. The track's rhythm doesn't swing; it cranks. There's a natural, but ephemeral, comparison to the "drum tracks" that came out of Chicago in the mid- and late-1980s. Drum tracks were tools to help DJs house-ify their sets; Kennedy is composing with rhythm, an outgrowth of Shackleton's early dubwise singles or the nimble grooves of bass explorer Loefah, placing him amongst the small group of producers who learned more from dubstep than how to book DJ gigs.
What's refreshing about Kennedy's tracks—alluded to in Madak's quote above—is the amount of fun he wrangles out of such a sparse and austere template. The melodic elements are bright and whipsmart. The synthesized horn sound that buoys "Headless" sounds like it's being played by a sad emoji. "Swill" is like the ballroom classic "The Ha Dance" reflected in a funhouse mirror. "Crank Call" is a disorienting tour de force, featuring a ringing telephone, heavy breathing, and what sounds like a filter sweep being performed on a pack of laughing hyenas.
Perhaps unsurprisingly coming from an artist who mostly bangs on cans, the nine tracks on Pearson Sound don't represent any kind of narrative or linear progression. Even for a dance album—a notoriously tricky medium—it can feel disassociated, so just as you'll never doubt you're listening to Pearson Sound, you may forget you're listening to Pearson Sound. Another quibble: The harsher, craggier sound palette used here—the product of analog gear, reading the press junket tea leaves—strips these tracks, subtly, of the graceful hypnosis of Kennedy's finest works ("Clutch" and "Lola", in addition to "REM" and "Untitled"). Still, Pearson Sound tracks are lessons in how to push boundaries without sacrificing dance music's primeval instincts, and Pearson Sound contains nine such lessons. Bang some things together in celebration.
