British producer Ewan Pearson may just be the ultimate poster boy for dance music geeks. He’s an academic-turned-DJ who grew up playing the piano and cello, but moved to synths after falling for the music of New Order, Man Parrish and, in his later teens, for acid house, Detroit techno and early Warp Records releases. All of which led the socially-awkward Pearson to a place that massively impacted his life and future — the dancefloor.

“It’s not an exaggeration to say that I learned how to love other people by going to nightclubs,” Pearson wrote this past August in a playfully misanthropic column for Germany’s Groove magazine called “On Collective Joy.”

“That column was obviously a bit embellished, but it’s not that far from the truth, in some ways,” says Pearson when I refer to the article. “My interests as a kid were all fairly insular; I liked reading, I wasn’t into sports and never really was a team person. I distrusted the gang mentality, did my own thing and had other friends who were awkward in similar ways. It really wasn’t until I started going to house clubs that I really enjoyed larger gatherings.”

Even now, more than a decade into a successful production, remixing and club DJing career, Pearson describes himself as “a librarian trapped in a DJs body.” He double-majored in philosophy and cultural studies in university, earning a master’s degree while also recording and performing live techno and house under the pseudonym Maas. He released numerous EPs and a full-length album, titled Latitudes, on Soma Recordings through the mid-to-late ‘90s and he also co-authored the book Discographies: Dance Music, Culture and the Politics of Sound, which was published by Routledge in 1999.

“I was going to be an academic — I started doing a Ph.D — so I sort of miss that at times,” says Pearson of balancing his interests. “Doing little bits of writing, like my column for Groove, does give me a little of that. And, to be honest, one of the nice things about DJing and all the traveling is that I get to read a lot.”

Pearson has become a frequent flying DJ largely thanks to his strong remix work. He’s reworked tunes by dozens of artists, including Freeform Five, Feist, Playgroup, Moby and Franz Ferdinand. Two collections of his remixes, Small Change (2001) and Piece Work (2007), showcase Pearson’s natural blending of underground and pop sensibilities.

“I kind of envy people who can be all monomaniacal about one particular underground thing, like turning out track after track of weird techno or something,” laughs Pearson, who now calls the techno capital of Berlin home. “I’ll do something and it all ends up sounding a bit poppy.

“That said, one of the reasons why the remix thing went so well for me, I think, is because I was doing vocal mixes that still ended up having the whole song in there. Bands and artists were happy because they weren’t having their whole song thrown away, you know, like where somebody samples a burp and makes a whole new track out of it, which was the pre-dominant model of remixing for a while. Somebody pointed out to me that I’d basically gone back to the ’80s model of the extended mix in some ways, when the idea was to do just enough to make it work on the dancefloor. At the moment though, I feel like I’d like to do something a little bit more odd and offbeat again.”

Between DJing, recording mix CDs and taking on remix gigs — he’s just completed new ones for Junior Boys and fellow Domino Records artist Jon Hopkins — Pearson also creates more experimental electronics, with partner Al Usher, as Kompakt Records act Partial Arts.

He also brings his production and programming skills to projects he’s recorded with artists as diverse as The Rapture, Goldfrapp, Gwen Stefani and, now for the second time, Tracy Thorn.
“We’re doing [Thorn’s] second solo album at the moment, which will be much more of a singer-songwriter record,” Pearson offers. “We’ll be recording with a drummer, bassist and guitarist in London in December so there will be some more upbeat stuff, but so far it’s mainly been her playing guitar and piano and singing, and me doing tiny little bits of additional stuff. So far, it’s quite bleak in a very beautiful way. There’s not going to be a dry eye in the house.”