From the Outside In: Pangaea's Ready to Shift Perceptions with His Debut Album

Kevin McAuley thanks me for agreeing to meet face to face. We were originally supposed to be talking over the phone but after a couple of emails he asked if we could do it in person over some vegan food. "It's easier this way," he tells me as we sit down. "Over the phone I just panic and worry about what I'm going to say next."

As it happens, he needn't have been worried about what he was going to say next, but his desire to conduct the interview person to person reflected something of a wider shift in the producer's work. As one third of Hessle Audio, McAuley—known to most of us as Pangaea—is most likely best associated with a dense, and determinedly headsy kind of dance music. The writer and critic Simon Reynolds once pegged the sort of isolationist grooves associated with the crew's output as nu-IDM or art techno—a less-than-generous reflection of a form of post-dubstep techno that is barbed and awkward, favoring idiosyncrasy over cohesion and danceability. Yet increasingly, following the path from the more focused rattle of his fabriclive mix (2014) through to the near-ebullience of his recent Crack mix (2016), McAuley is drawing from a seemingly renewed interest in a more straightforward relationship with the dancefloor, and a more direct communication with people. It's this relationship that characterises his debut LP on Hessle, In Drum Play.

McAuley readily recognizes this shift. "Something like "Majestic 12" which is on the Release double-pack (2012) is a really straightforward techno record," he tells me. "But it's mixed in with a lot of oddball, bassy things—so you could tell that my music was trying to find its place." The search for this place, in the words of the text accompanying his record, is "a product of the feedback loop between the studio and the club." When I ask McAuley how he explains this, he puts it in terms of a very logical, environmental process. "It's just what you play in a club informing what happens in the studio," he says. "I want to write stuff I will DJ at its core. Moving into the techno world, rather than being cut adrift."

It's not unreasonable that McAuley's outlook on production began a little adrift. Growing up in a village, ten miles from Swindon, far away from anything resembling a thriving club culture, DJing was an isolated experience. "I had no other DJ friends or anything," he remembers. "I'd tape stuff off Radio 1, Essential Mixes, and I'd just listen to them. It wasn't in a club, it was just me."

It wasn't until mixes he'd exchanged with school friends earned him an invitation to DJ at a local rave, that he first played in front of other people. "I was playing Tidy Trax stuff before a load of drum and bass DJs—pure 140,145 BPM stuff—which is pretty funny really. But that's where I heard drum and bass being played, I thought this is is sick, saw people actually dancing." After a couple of years of this he moved to Leeds, and the rest is recent history.

Progressing to 2016—nearly a decade after Hessle Audio's first release—and McAuley is promoting his debut album. While full of typically cerebral jams, there's a confident and clear raison d'être. Cuts like "Lofty Can" and "One By One" exude a lightness of character, and a freedom of movement, that while not unheard of, mark the record out as his most outwardly engaged work to date. It's a pattern reflected by his fellow label-heads—Pearson Sound's arguably produced one of the year's biggest tracks, Ben UFO's become one of the biggest club DJs in the UK—the outsiders have been making their way inside. McAuley believes this has always been the challenge. As he puts it, "I guess that's why Hessle output has slowed because we only want to release things that are different, but they still need to work within the context of what's going on," he tells me. "It's a hard thing to thread sometimes. The line between being interesting and effective."

That said, for all the talk of this shift, what good is club-ready music if there are no nightclubs left open to play it in? Before long our talk turns to the declining health of British nightlife, and the decreasing inches of available space within which dancing can actually take place. As McAuley sees it, this isn't just a problem for the industry, but for experimentalism in general.

"Clubs are spaces where people come together and inevitably ideas will get share," he enthuses. "When Plastic People closed, a place where so many disparate elements had come together, where people would go to have a drink and bump into each other, was suddenly gone. With Fabric told to close, again, they were so supportive of bringing people through in the early stages of their careers. These spaces are so important for nurturing sounds."

In this sense, nightclubs are far more than venues. They are incubators—allowing individuality to find a context in the community, giving strange sounds the confidence to become scenes. "If there are nights that cater to that, as there were with dubstep, then that allows things to grow and mutate," McAuley agrees. "But if all those edges are ironed out, things become flat, and people just want to make music that sounds like Berghain techno from three years ago, then where is anything going to go?"

As we continue to talk, it becomes clear that more than just club closures, it is conformity in general that confounds and frustrates him. "I think I said in an interview a while ago that there is an appetite for open-minded dance music," he sighs with a slightly deflated laugh. "I guess maybe the appetite is just smaller than I'd imagined." The appetite might not be smaller in reality, but it's easy to see what he means. Despite constant cries that club culture must be saved from the perspective of the industry, it remains to be seen where the next great cultural shift will come from. Where the next alien sound will coalesce. "It's so fascist isn't it? This world we're entering," McAuley grins. "Well, that's a really extreme way of putting it, but it's this shift towards conformity, that the general consensus seems to want. People should be allowed to be a bit weird, a bit odd."

On a landscape typified by an absence of club culture, or a version of it best described as anodyne, Pangaea and Hessle Audio remain beacons of what can be achieved when convention is rejected. For all In Drum Play sees McAuley subverting introspective expectations more than at any other time in his career, it is still a decidedly twisted and dark incarnation of techno—and as such is likely the most interesting and specifically UK music you'll hear in the a club this year. "I don't think I'd ever be able to write a straightforward tune without something leftfield," he confesses, shortly before we part ways. "It's just naturally what happens. It's more of an effort to steer myself on track, and I have to discipline myself on occasion to keep it from complete oddball territory." British clubs may need his attention more than ever, but it's a blessing he hasn't left his own head completely.

In Drum Play is out now on Hessle Audio

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