Peter Kember was born on November 19, 1965, in Rugby, England. The Spacemen 3 co-founder, guitarist and vocalist built a musical life around a simple idea: a repeated figure could reveal more the longer you stayed with it. That interest connected his work with the band to the electronic recordings he made as Sonic Boom and the collaborations that followed.
His education began partly in a record shop. In a 2013 interview with Red Bull Music Academy, Kember recalled visiting Vicky’s in Rugby, whose owner brought records back from London and opened the shop after school. Learning guitar sharpened his ear for something those records shared. Songs he loved often used very few chords, sometimes with one note running through all of them. “I’ve always had an empathy with really simple music,” he explained. He heard possibilities in holding onto a note and changing what happened around it.
Kember and Jason Pierce formed Spacemen 3 in 1982. By 1989’s Playing with Fire, the band could move between blunt force and much softer music without abandoning that fascination with repetition. Kember wrote and sang “Revolution,” driving its confrontational lyric through an insistent guitar attack. His “Honey” occupied a gentler corner of the same album. The distance between those songs helps explain why reducing his work to volume alone misses so much.
Making the album involved practical setbacks as well as musical choices. In a 2019 interview with The Quietus, Kember recalled re-recording parts after material was erased during sessions in Cornwall; roughly half the album was completed back at VHF near Rugby. He also described the band’s sparse drumming and musical limitations as productive constraints. “We were trying to make something out of nothing,” he said. But the partnership was becoming less collaborative: Kember recalled that Pierce didn’t play on “Honey,” while he himself didn’t play on Pierce’s “Lord Can You Hear Me.”
Kember had already opened another route before Spacemen 3 split in 1991. His 1990 solo album Spectrum appeared under the Sonic Boom name, and Spectrum subsequently became the name of a separate band. Experimental Audio Research, also known as E.A.R., gave him room for more improvisatory work. These projects kept him exploring electronic instruments while his recording skills also became part of other musicians’ records. He mixed Panda Bear’s Tomboy, released in 2011, beginning a collaboration that would eventually put both artists’ names on an album.
His own All Things Being Equal arrived in 2020. The recordings began as modular-synthesizer sketches in 2015, and Kember considered releasing them as instrumentals before deciding to add vocals. After moving to Portugal, he returned to those backing tracks, with the natural surroundings of Sintra feeding into the lyrics. “Just Imagine,” the opening song, placed his voice among repeating electronic patterns. The finished album brought songcraft and his interest in the individual character of synthesizers together, with Panda Bear also contributing guest vocals.
For Reset, his 2022 album with Panda Bear, Kember found another starting point in records he already owned. He isolated introductions from older pop songs, made loops from them and sent them to his collaborator, who developed them into songs. Parts originally designed to lead into someone else’s recording became foundations for new ones. On “Edge of the Edge,” the pair built around a sample of Randy & the Rainbows’ 1963 recording “Denise.”
