BC064 - Five Mixes: Pearson Sound on Hessle Audio, Rinse FM, 2019-24
Five years, five efflorescent shows
By request! Well, sort of: Beat Connection reader Matt Hendrickson, responding to BC054, asked for “all the Ben UFO mixes!” Whereupon I put together a playlist of Hessle Audio shows from Rinse FM that had kept my ear over the past several years. Ben UFO is the show’s prime mover, but a striking number of episodes were solo Pearson Sound sets, including this January’s edition. I’d earmarked it for another roundup that I’ll get to later, but keying a broader selection to it was too good an opportunity to pass up. (I’ll get to Ben UFO another time, promise.) All of them carry the same credit as the headline above, so I’m IDing them below solely by date. Have fun; it’s quite an efflorescent bunch.
You can listen to all five sets on this SoundCloud playlist.
March 4, 2019
A slow, stalking bass line to kick us off—how perfect. There are over a hundred episodes of the Hessle Audio show on Rinse FM listed on Pearson Sound’s MixesDB page; the earliest, co-credited to Ben UFO, Floating Points, and Joy Orbison, comes from May 2011. My picks here are no statement of completeness—the opposite, in fact: the recency is mainly due to this being where my playlist archives on SoundCloud itself begins. But it’s a good way to keep things neat; ten hours is a lot of time to spend with any DJ, even a reliably good one.
That’s been the case for quite some time. I’ve liked Pearson Sound as a producer and DJ since becoming aware of him in the late 2000s, and he’s enormously variable, even as he can nominally be said to have occupied much the same lane consistently through the years. I don’t mean he hasn’t changed, or hasn’t changed enough, or is impervious to change. As you’ll see and hear, each of these sets differ in pronounced ways, but the first time through them all, even I wondered just how much. No surprise—as each displayed itself, it became clear that emphasis and tone, not of style, accounted for those shifts, and also for their richness. Ben UFO might just throw anything at you; Pearson Sound’s going to throw something at you, but chances are it won’t be a shock, even if, or when, it’s a surprise.
Back to that b-line stalking us at the top: It’s a feint, because this set is luminous, not ominous. (And that, in turn, sets the tone for the other four below.) It’s pretty, with an astringent touch that keeps it from cloying. Goth-pop (@ 52:00) and opalescent acid loops (@ 25:00) and something Latin-tinged and dredged in watery FX (@ 1:18:45), among a lot else, all sounds of a piece. Juicy eclecticism yes.
July 19, 2021
I didn’t pick this one for documentary reasons, though as it turns out I could have. My selecting it has a more prosaic basis—RA picked it as a Mix of the Day and it came about during the pandemic’s prime, a period that was anemic for my mix listening. I experience mixes as part of a living culture, and when going to clubs and parties dried up in person, so did listening to DJ sets at home; did and does. The timing was inopportune—DJs at home with little else to do were churning out sets, so there was a bounty, not to mention acres of available livestreams. I availed myself of a little, but not a lot. It just didn’t feel right—too disconnected. What I didn’t realize until a second listen was that for the first seven minutes or so, Pearson Sound discusses, in detail, safety protocols for reopening venues. What a snapshot, eh? It’s a selection rather than a mix (another thing he announces at the top), and exceptionally rangy and full of obvious old favorites, such as the decade-older Hessle Audio-related stretch in the fourth quarter, as well as the dub section the RA writeup mentions. The latter exits onto “Mwoin Ka Songé” (@ 63:00), originally from 1986, reissued in 2023 (two years after this set, please note), and which I initially took to be vintage Gilberto Gil, high praise indeed.
May 16, 2022
Much of these two hours evoke a more greyscale feel than usual; the tones are so dry you can see breath in the air, climaxed by an apt re-rub of “Set Fire to Me” (@ 44:00), a song welcome in almost any company. A lot of fetchingly mangled percussion follows—from Lisbon, the DJ back-announces, ahead of his appearance there (@ 1:13:00), a momentary snapshot that paints a vivid, and quite psychedelic, picture.
February 20, 2023
A year ago, I mentioned this one briefly—it was the Rinse show that inspired my March-long deep dive. I didn’t go back to it, and I really should have; I now curse myself for not adding it to my 2023 Top 50 Mixes. It’s the most abundantly fun set here, which isn’t a slur on the others—they’re brainier, unapologetically and richly so, and we love that too around here. Sure, there’s some minimalist longueurs, but overall this one grabs a little faster. It’s a little sillier. An old-school purist might cavil that it’s still too brainy. They might have a point, but oh well.
January 15, 2024
Bulbous low end, bubbly on top—like old times, or just the eternal returns of a now classic style? It’s both, of course—now and always. And how symmetrical—the end of our odyssey plays like the beginning of our odyssey in reverse, decelerating to dub over its final 20 minutes. I didn’t ask for a conclusion this neat, but I’ll take it.