The last time ALASDAIR DUNCAN spoke with EWAN PEARSON, just on two years ago, the British DJ and producer had just moved to Berlin and was hoping to improve his German. Perhaps sensing that the question will be asked, Pearson admits up front that he has a German lesson soon after the interview – his first in about six months – and is nervous about how it will go...

“The thing about it is,” he says, laughing, “Berlin is a very international city, and there’s a high level of English spoken here, which means you have to work very hard to learn the language, and you need to make quite a concerted effort to pick it up.” Pearson even admits that, for several nights, he has been having anxiety dreams about going back to class. Naked anxiety dreams, I wonder? “No!” he assures me, laughing even harder. “I don’t even have to be naked. I just have to be standing in front of them, unable to conjugate things ...”

Although he may have difficulty with the thornier aspects of spoken German, Pearson is certainly a first-rate record spinner. His last two compilations – a lush, melodic collection of house tracks for the Soma label, and a harder, more techno oriented mix for Fabric – were both astonishingly good examples of the craft of the DJ mix album. What kind of tunes is he playing these days, I wonder? “There’s loads of really good disco and Balearic stuff around at the moment,” he tells me, “and there’s a big house revival happening in Berlin at the moment. The trouble is, there’s almost too much to choose from. There are so many records out there I want to play, but having them all fit together and make sense in the one DJ set, that’s the challenge ...”

Quite aside from his work as a DJ, Ewan Pearson is also one of electronic music’s most in-demand producers and remixers – last year, he worked on M83’s breathtaking Saturdays = Youth album – and although he promised himself some time off, a number of projects have beckoned. Pearson has just completed a remix of the new Junior Boys single, and is particularly excited about it. “It has a very mid-eighties, post-disco pre-house kind of sound. I’ve done a really old-fashioned, extended 12-inch mix, kind of like a Shep Pettibone mix,” he tells me. He has also produced several more records, including the second solo album from Everything But The Girl’s Tracey Thorn (he also worked on her first), which is due out later in the year.

Although music is his consuming passion, Pearson has a strong affinity for the written word. As a child, he was determined to do something creative, but while he enjoyed writing, he felt he did not necessarily have the acumen to be a novelist. “You have to be a really acute watcher and listener, and I think I’m too much of a space case,” he laughs. To this day, he is still a voracious reader – currently, he’s working his way through the novels of WG Sebald and Philip Roth – and loves long plane flights, because, as he says, “I put earplugs in and just read and read and read.” Though he assures me he does not have a book in him, I make a bet with Pearson that, the next time I speak to him, the urge to write a DJ memoir might well have overcome him. I suppose we’ll see ...

EWAN PEARSON plays at Family with Claude Von Stroke on Saturday January 24. For ticket information check out www.moshtix.com.au. For more information go to www.myspace.com/ewanpearson.

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