I’ve been following Pete Kember’s career intermittently since his Spacemen 3 days, through his on/off solo career as Spectrum/Sonic Boom and his collaborative projects under the Experimental Audio Research moniker. Back in my 20s, Kember’s music (and fellow Spaceman Jason Pearce’s early Spritualized records) felt like a vital ingredient to some psychedelic mis-adventures that, for better or worse, seeded a lifelong solidarity.
A tendency towards druggy nihilism was, perhaps, not an obvious recipe for commercial success, nor music biz longevity, but Kember is still going strong. He now lives in Portugal and has added the work of producer to his creative endeavours. All Things Being Equal was a more than decent solo effort released during lockdown that showed Kember’s Suicide/VU predilections remained reassuringly intact. For his latest album, Reset – a collaboration with Noah Lennox, aka Panda Bear – Kember has built sampled loops from some of his favourite rock ‘n’ roll records over which Lennox adds sometimes beautiful sunshine harmonies. I thought the review on Boomkat offered a spot-on summation: “Each song employs more or less the same formula, balancing the lo-fi tartness of the peak blog era (2007?), the Beach Boys’ brightly-illuminated Cali psychedelia and what could » Continue Reading.