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ROOM AT THE TOP
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The genre-defying DJ/ Producer formerly known as Ramadanman, Pearson Sound, aka David Kennedy, is at the leading edge of dance music: where dubstep meets house meets dancefloor
Words: Joe Muggs
Photos: Antonio Petronzio, H Raymond, Benjamin Beil
Published in Mixmag August 2011
If you want to know what David Kennedy, aka Pearson Sound, aka the artist formerly known as Ramadanman, is all about, you have to go back to Aqua. Yes, the cartoonish Danish Euro-trance-pop band. And no, we didn’t expect that either. It goes like this: the 22-year-old has just told Mixmag that the first thing that got him obsessed with music was “hearing dance stuff in the charts”. “What sort?” we ask. “UK garage? Dizzee Rascal’s first hits?” After all, David’s bass-heavy, genre-jumbling records and DJ sets are about as hip as hip can get, and totally rooted in UK bass history. We’ve just seen the off-Sonar party hosted by Hessle Audio (the label he runs with close friends Pangaea and Ben UFO) turn out to be one of the hottest tickets in Barcelona, and his ‘Fabriclive 56’ mix has proved a classic, even in that illustrious series. He must’ve been a cool kid. “No,” he says, completely serious, “Aqua. ‘Dr Jones’. Hard trance beats with a silly pop song on top.”
This tells us two vital things about him. First, that he’s not pretentious. Although Hessle Audio is beloved of trend chasers, he’s pretty easy-going company and doesn’t seem image-conscious. His shades-of-grey clothes are quite a long way from shabby, but neither are they or his schoolboy haircut particularly ‘cool’ – even his retro sports bag, it turns out, used to be his dad’s. Bar a moment when he baulks at our photographer’s request to put sunglasses on for fear of looking like a clichéd egotistical “wanker DJ”, there’s very little sense that he’s ever worried about how he comes over.
And second, it tells us that when it comes to music, he likes it in-your-face. OK, he might have moved on from pop-trance since he was 11, but for someone who was known at first for making deep dubstep and still for the subtlety of his production, his funky-as-hell recent tracks like ‘Work Them’ and ‘Glut’ aren’t afraid to go all out in pursuit of dancefloor mania.
‘Work Them’, on dubstep legend Loefah’s Swamp81 label, is maybe the track that demonstrates his appeal best. Running at house tempo, it’s almost all percussive sounds: rolling breakbeats that evoke both the booty-bass variant of Baltimore club music and the best of old-school jungle, the gleaming crunk snare fills and soundsystem-testing bassdrum boom that come from the iconic Roland TR-808, and the catch-your breath repetitions of the title phrase.
But for just over a minute in the middle of the tune, the rhythm fades and a set of intense chords (“My emo chords,” laughs David) rise, then dissipate before the beat comes back in switched up another couple of notches. That section is nothing less than a complete re-invention of the club track breakdown, and the beat itself is the epitome of the new wave of artists who are able to take elements from dance music past and present and combine them without diluting their vital qualities. And it sends people apeshit.
This lack of pretention and the ability to create a certified banger are undoubtedly connected. While others have fretted about fitting into the latest microgenre, or sweated over their PCs to work out new ways of exploring the spaces opened up by dubstep’s immense bass, David has increasingly blithely trampled across styles, without regard for whether what he’s doing is on trend – and as a result has quickly and quietly built up a back catalogue to die for, and picked up support from Croydon to Ibiza in the process. He is perhaps the perfect representation of the generation for whom dubstep has been a powerful catalyst: discovering it at the age of 17 gave him a new framework for creating club music not beholden to the past, and since then he has simply taken that sense of newness and excitement into everything he’s done.
Sitting up on the roof of Borough Market in South East London, where the photographer has brought us so David can stand on various perilous ledges, he ponders on how he got to the position of being a figurehead for the new school. “Well, I generally try not to think about it,” he says with a raise of the eyebrows. “Or rather,” he looks more serious, “I think about the details – about what I’m doing next, or what the label’s doing next – but if I try and see it in terms of how far I’ve come, or what it all means, it can be quite overwhelming.” Not surprising, really. It’s easy to forget, talking to this grown-up, smartly dressed and confident man who’s just toured America with UK garage legend Zed Bias and played to thousands at Sonar, that David’s barely out of university.
He grew up in North London, the son of a headteacher father and engineer mother. They had him relatively late in life – both are now in their 60s – and neither had much interest in popular culture. But once radio had led him to the glories of Aqua, he began insatiably searching for more interesting music thrills. He quickly discovered grime via London’s pirate radio, and by the age of 14 had discovered the joys of the specialist record shop. “I used to pester the guys at [now defunct store] Vinyl Junkies in Soho,” he remembers, “I’m sure they were annoyed by this precocious little kid, but it was great for me, finding out all about US house and stuff like that.”
He tried his hand at beatmaking, doing house, hip hop, d’n’b and more. But it was when he tried making grime that a friend said “that sounds like dubstep”. He had no idea what dubstep was, but sought the sound out at FWD>> in Shoreditch, where he met and befriended the Leeds-based DJ Ben UFO. David’s conversion to the sound was total: “For about three years, I went to dubstep nights up to three or four nights a week!” When he went up to university in Leeds the following year, he, Ben and Kevin ‘Pangaea’ McAuley set to creating the Hessle Audio label you now know.
Since then, it’s simply been a case of one record at a time, one gig at a time, enjoying the parties and fringe benefits (some of them anyway: asked about girls, he laughs and mentions his steady girlfriend). So it happened that by the time he finished his English and French degree last year, David was already making a living from music without ever having intended to do so. Fresh faced as he looks, he seems ready to take on the industry.
For the moment, anyway... when Mixmag suggests that maybe the new generation of artists have learned the lessons of 90s superstar DJs, he laughs. “Maybe,” he muses, “There are a lot of cool people in the scene. But it might just be because we’re young and haven’t had a chance to fuck ourselves up yet!” Should be an interesting ride.
Hessle Audio Top 5
The five game changing tracks
TRG – ‘Broken Heart’ (Martyn’s DCM remix) (2008)
The tune that broke Martyn, the luscious, multi-layered ‘Broken Heart’ remix remains an all-time dubstep classic.
Buy & Download here
Untold – ’Anaconda’ (2009)
Close associate and Hemlock boss Untold blew minds with his deranged mutant grime.
Buy & Download here
Joe – ‘Claptrap’ (2010)
Rapid clapping, crackles and huge bass. A stone cold anthem.
Buy & Download here
Pearson Sound – ‘Blanked’ (2010)
Featuring more of David’s patent “emo chords”, this time with a sultry, slowed-down d’n’b throb.
Buy & Download here
Peverelist – ‘Dance Until The Police Come’/ ‘Fundamentals’ (2011)
A guest spot on the label for Bristol don Tom Ford, this is astounding broken techno.
Buy & Download here
