PEARSON SOUND - Pearson Sound

Hessle Audio, the label run by Pangaea, Ben Ufo and Pearson Sound, has for several years now been the British answer to the uptempo side of the PAN roster – and thus to the likes of Lee Gamble, Objekt and Heatsick. The transfiguration of clubbing and the transformation of techno into an autonomous musical substance are the two focal points of a label that chose from the very start not to close itself off, and that for some years now has arguably been the most coherent protagonist of a rather treacherous path.

Three years ago Pangaea put together perhaps the most effective manifesto of intent, with that "Release" through which his vision of techno (London in its handwriting, Berlin at its heart) made its way, erected as a space of inner claustrophobia, of the rawest physicality, of unconditioned, isolated instinct. If Ben Ufo is the priest who works only in close contact with the audience, and Pangaea became the demiurge here, Pearson Sound has stayed behind the scenes, experimenting. And it's precisely now that he steps into the open, presenting himself as the chemist, the scientist.

His self-titled album is a hallucinated journey through a transvalued, surrealist techno, left to decompose and reassembled into the most unthinkable shapes. The hallucinated forms so dear to Actress, stripped down to the bare essentials on "Crank Call"; the parodically sci-fi ones of "Asphalt Sparkle"; or the chaotic, deliberately ill-organised ones (attitude and method powered by Hecker) of "Swill". There's no method to Pearson Sound's science of sound: here too, it's pure, uncontaminated instinct that triumphs, free to dictate the law.

The idea is interesting and represents one of the key passages in the Hessle Audio grammar, but the album partly tends to lose itself in its inevitable atmospheric fragmentation. Stand-out moments of real class do surprise, though: "Glass Eye", somewhere between Lee Gamble and latter-day Prurient; the closing "Rubber Tree", metallic and cutting; and "Russet", anarchy stripped of its destructive power and dressed up in an astronaut's suit. Far less convincing are the sinister calls into the void of "Headless", the post-industrial drones of "Gristle", or the predictable analogue detour of "Six Congas".

An effective manifesto in positioning itself upstream of complex, synthesised sonic substance, an archive of ideas and sound elements of undoubted importance in shaping it. But, for now, Pearson Sound is all this (no small thing) and nothing more than this.

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24/03/2015