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Ewan Pearson Fabric 35 [EAC+FLAC]
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Ewan Pearson Fabric 35 [EAC+FLAC] (Size: 476.61 MB) (Files: 18)
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Ewan Pearson - Fabric 35 [FLAC].log
Ewan Pearson - Fabric 35 [FLAC].m3u
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Review by Pitchforkmedia.com:
Ewan Pearson
Piece Work/Fabric 35
[Fabric; 2007]
Rating: 8.2/8.0
Would electro-house have happened without Ewan Pearson? Certainly, but it probably wouldn't have erupted so spectacularly. Pearson's 2002 remix of Freeform Five's "Perspex Sex" is the key moment in the genre's emergence out of electroclash, the seductive drive of its house beat signaling the moment when the machines turned on their masters and demanded their own dancefloor satisfaction. Living up to the original song's title, the "Perspex Sex" remix combined sadistic robot vocals with a speaker-tearing synthesizer riff that sounded and felt like a fist squeezing your heart convulsively. In retrospect though, this dancefloor monster's most telling attribute is the sudden flood of sorrowing strings towards the end, which lift the song to an eerie, oddly self-reflective climax, perhaps inviting listeners to consider the consequences of their amoral program of sexual gratification.
It's this shift in register towards the widescreen and the cinematic that has become characteristic of Pearson's astonishing (and astonishingly prolific) run of remixes ever since. Despite a short run of solo productions in the late 1990s as Maas, and today as Partial Arts (with Al Usher), it is Pearson's remix work over the last five years that has both established his name and defined an individual aesthetic, so it's fitting that it should now receive the lavish double-disc retrospective treatment.
Piece Work is an exhausting document, but its size feels appropriate: more than anything else, what Pearson's remix work has always called to mind is the "extended mix" of pop songs so common in the 1980s, sensitively redeploying the original songs' charms amidst epic dancefloor arrangements of synthetic splendor, with sonic cues equally drawn from Giorgio Moroder, New Order, and Orbital. But Pearson's ideological commitment to the extended mix should not be mistaken for conservatism. In fact, he's weakest when he's most tentative: On pretty but underwhelming remixes for Closer Musik and Depeche Mode, he sounds too enamored and respectful of the originals. Rather, the best material on Piece Work interprets the notion of the extended mix as a process of destruction and resurrection, Pearson stripping the source material to its bare essentials (usually just a vocal and perhaps a solitary melodic hook) and rebuilding it into something more majestic than the original's creators could have envisioned.
As with Jacques Lu Cont's remixes, it's often the less-than-perfect originals that are most astonishingly transformed: witness how "The Golden Path", the Chemical Brothers' bloodless synth-rock collaboration with the Flaming Lips, is blown up into a swirling electro epic, its endless neo-Moroder groove ceaselessly introducing more and more synthesizer lines and sound effects, until it finally explodes into a climax of sighing firefly harmonies. Stripping from the song the signifiers of the psychedelic, Pearson's buzzing electro version is psychedelic in substance, its effortless evocation of panoramic visions acting as a rebuke to the original's empty pretensions.
Despite having dabbled in a number of sonic gimmicks that are clearly of their time (from schaffel to glitchy minimal beats to acid 303 spirals to neo-shoegazer guitar chords), today Pearson's remixes mostly sound more contemporary than I expected them to, perhaps owing to his characteristic largess. This is partly a matter of timing-- dance music is in love with the epic at the moment-- but I wonder if Pearson's best work, consistently exceeding and overspilling its functional qualities, simply resists temporal classification; by being so allusive of so many sounds and sensations, these grooves can always find a "home" within current trends.
The collection's most recent effort, a dramatic extended reconstruction of Cortney Tidwell's "Don't Let Stars Keep Us Tangled Up", demonstrates perfectly how Pearson's signature sound weathers changes in fashion: its unusually soft, shimmering assemblage of interwoven chime loops blends exacting discipline with mind-altering expansiveness, sounding equally at home amidst DJ sets peddling minimal, deep house, or cosmic disco, and always finding something in its surroundings to pick up and reflect back more brightly.
Pearson's lavish production bleeds into his DJ sets, which are gaining a higher profile due to his superlative mixing style: often matching not just the beat but also the harmonic key between tracks, he has a knack for pulling off fast but flawless transitions that sound utterly organic. Mixing skills are only part of the story, however, and 2005's Sci.Fi.Hi.Fi. mix was equally impressive for the distinctively melodic floating quality it sustained for long stretches. Pearson's recent Fabric mix sounds more in line with current European dance trends, but while its rigorous focus on the dancefloor sacrifices some of the magical cinematic feel of Sci.Fi.Hi.Fi., its relentless physicality makes it the stronger effort overall.
Aside from the odd inclusion of a percussive punk-funk workout from Liquid Liquid, this time around Pearson mostly opts for minimally melodic, big-riffing tech-house. In context, the Liquid Liquid detour makes more sense: hypnotically muscular tracks such as Konrad Black's remix of Snax's "Honeymoon's Over", Tobi Neumann's remix of Johannes Heil's "All For One", and Kaos' "Panopeeps" share the same monomaniacal focus on percussive grooves translated into an electronic environment, endlessly reiterating simple combinations of glowering bass and mnemonic keyboard riffs in a manner that builds up an intense sense of friction, as if the various components are literally rubbing themselves against one another.
It's here, within the grooves, that Pearson's penchant for melodrama has been discreetly secreted, and what at first seems unspectacular and almost workmanlike gradually reveals itself to be chasing a grandeur of a different kind. Right at the end he relents and pulls out the big gesture, laying the familiar vocals from Beanfield's "Tides" over Aril Brikha's monstrously portentous neo-trance "Berghain". The shameless grandstanding of the resulting sing-along anthem stops just short of self-parody; we'd expect nothing less.
-Tim Finney, September 19, 2007
