Ewan Pearson & Dance Culture's Philosophically Bright Future

"I always thought that "dance music is dead' attitude was highly premature. I don't think it works like that anymore; that notion that you have a musical movement, then you have a revolution and everything changes is an old fashioned model."

Chatting down the line from his new Berlin home, English electro-house star Ewan Pearson remains calmly enthusiastic about the much debated state of contemporary club culture.

"The way music works these days is that you have multiple styles existing alongside each other and new things come along. Everything is much more jumbled up and we're very good at bastardizing and hybridizing things. We're good at taking genres and corrupting a little bit to chuck out something slightly different. As far as I'm concerned, things are healthy. Personally, all I ever wanted was to be able to make a living from doing this; as long as that remains the case I'm happy. "

The "this' he's referring to is DJing, producing, remixing and increasingly touring the world off the back of the electro-house scene he's helped pioneer and foment. Lending significant weight to his theories on the death of dance music is his high level academic background studying and teaching philosophy and cultural studies which even included a stint as a university lecturer.

"When I did my English degree I did a lot of literary theory, and I really got off on that, so I ended up doing a wider cultural theory MA, which involved a lot of stuff about post- modernism and aesthetics," he explains.

"But rather than just writing about books, I was writing about subjects including football, music and film. Being able to pontificate about the stuff that you are really passionate about particularly music was too good an opportunity to miss," he continues.

"Writing about music is difficult, because a lot of what's great about music is your gut reaction to it, your visceral reaction. I wrote quite a lot about the problems with writing about music and why lots of the people who had previously been dealing with it, especially concerning pop, had done so badly in a journalistic or intellectual context."

Intellectual contextualizing aside, he's currently off on a DJ tour of Australia, his first trip to the Antipodes.

"The furthest I've been away previously is Cape Town, I played there just before last Christmas and I've also been to Mexico," says Ewan.

This Australian tour just the start of me breaking out past Europe, really, this is my furthest trip yet."


Skrufff (Jonty Skrufff): How do you describe the sound you play as a DJ at the moment-

Ewan Pearson: "If I have to have select a phrase I call it "acid house' though I think that says more about my age than anything else. It's a non-descriptive term and I use it in the way a magazine like Jockey Slut used it, as an attitude or an approach, rather than anything strict like "it's got to have a 303'. When I started going out clubbing it was to the Balearic scene and that was all about mixing up music and that's still what I'm still interested in. So when I'm DJing I'm playing techno and electro and acid, the odd breaks records; whatever works. I get really bored listening to the same things for hours on end. I'm not very good at doing the same thing for more than about 15 minutes. I don't understand people who are militantly into their little niches, I've always tarted about basically."

Skrufff: How do you view the whole mixing, technical side of DJing-

Ewan Pearson: "I think it's more about sequencing, it's about what you play and the order in which you play it. I'm not the world's greatest technician and I will happily admit that; I'm definitely not the person to go and see for spinbacks or that kind of thing. Anyone can learn to beatmix by DJing on your own at home but I think the real key to DJing is how you play records out to people; how they react and how you react back. You can only learn that process in front of people. So you ge Tags

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