The Juan MacLean - The Future Will Come

From the opening moments of The Simple Life, it is clear what kind of album The Future Will Come will be. The driving beats, the relentless hi-hats, even the ubiquitous cowbell mark this well and truly as a DFA album. That is not to say it is indistinguishable from any other album on the label, more that it fits into this mould while affirming its own identity.

Each track on The Juan MacLean’s new album is captivating in its own right, as well as adding up to form a coherent body of work that can be listened to in bits or in one go.

The album’s title is ironic, given the nods paid to older tracks. The Station and new single One Day call to mind The Human League, as male and female vocals argue over throbbing beats, while No Time even hints towards Mylo’s Drop The Pressure. Conversely, A New Bot is the most awkwardly futuristic track on the album.

Tonight, the album’s centrepiece, drifts through on a host of melancholic instrumentation, as acid basslines are topped off with mournful trumpets and out of tune pianos, while Nancy Whang sings of “all the love in this place.” The curious balance of such contented lyrics and more elegiac melodies is maintained until the album’s closer, last year’s epic Happy House. This choice of finale is fitting, as its warm piano riff and joyful lyrics are lent an air of darkness, undermined almost, by the preceding Human Disaster.

While such regretful undertones permeate the album it is definitely one which will get bodies moving. It’s only April, but if a funkier album comes along this year I will be very surprised.

Dan Deacon

The first thing I want to ask about is your compositional process. As far I know ‘Bromst’ is the first record that you’ve had other musicians (drummers etc.) other than singers on your records, or at least aside from vocalists it was just you playing on ‘Spiderman Of The Rings’. How did working with people change things for you and at what stage did you begin to bring people in? Did you start by jamming with people from the off and seeing what happened, did you bring demos to people and work from there trying out different things or were your ideas pretty much fully realised when people came in and you just told them what to play? How did you find working with people as opposed to your previous solitary process?

The performers were brought in as the recording process went along. The parts were already written and in most cases sheet music was printed out and given to the performers. There are only a few sections in the drum kit parts that were structured improvisations (the fills in ‘Woof Woof’ and the b section of ‘Of The Mountains’ has a few layered drum solos buried in the mix).

Working with people is great. It was a really good re-learning experience and taught me a lot. I definitely approach composing a little differently now. After years of writing for a computer I had to relearn how to write with in the restrictions of human abilities, which is a lot more fun and a lot more challenging (for me anyway). For example, when writing for synth drums, it doesn’t matter if there are 6 drum kits at the same moment because the synth drummer doesn’t need to worry about arms and feet. When writing for a real human, clearly there is a limit to the amount of sound events that can be created at a time.

There’s a far more organic tone to the album than on the last one, I’m thinking in particular of the live drums or even the glockenspiel that closes out ‘Snookered’ and opens up ‘Of The Mountains’, was that sense something you were aiming for right away? I’ve always thought that there was a really warm feel to a lot of the synth tones you’ve used in the past, particularly the single note stuff that underpins some of the older songs, is the feel of ‘Bromst’ a natural progression of that?

I think so. Beyond the acoustic instrumentation I think a lot of it has to due to the recording process and mixing process. SMOTR was recorded in a week in my bedroom with one mic. ‘Bromst’ was recorded over a 9 month period and mixed in an all analog studio. I still love lo-fi sounds but I wanted to try working in hi-fi. The studio we worked in, snow ghost, was just amazing and it added a lot of character and quality to the album.

On the subject of natural progressions there’s songs on the new record that if I heard without being told who it was that I never would have guessed were yours, ‘Wet Wings’ in particular would fall into that category but there are parts of the record that make it sound unmistakably like a Dan Deacon album; the drums exploding into the mix about 3 minutes into ‘Build Voice” or some of the arpeggios you use, or the pitch shifted vocals. In particular one song,”Baltihorse”, sounds like a distillation of some of my favourite parts of your last record, but it seems to me to be more concise and more focused. You’re now on your 8th or 9th album since 2003 and I’m wondering if you find it easier to accomplish what it is you’re trying to achieve with your music as time has gone on or is it more of a trial an error thing? Do you have a vision of what you want to do with a song when you start composing it?

Each song starts differently. Sometimes it’s already written in my head and I just need to figure out how to get it out. Other times it’s a slow battle between me and an idea, trying to hash it out into something. Other times it comes from improvising or jamming or fooling around. I don’t think its’ getting easier. I hope it doesn’t. It would suck if it did.

The reason I ask the last question is that at odds with what the widespread perceptions of you might be in that you’re a wacky pied piper character with a bunch of crazy ideas and a table full of gadgets that makes for a sweaty fun time for the folks that come to your gigs whenever I read interviews with you or your MySpace blogs and bulletins you strike me as being very thoughtful and serious about your music. Do you on occasion feel frustration at not getting enough credit for the sophistication of your music?

To be honest, yes, I do get frustrated. But I realize that I shouldn’t. People’s perceptions are their own to make. It’s not like I am not any of those things they say I am. I just wish they would also see the other side as well. The juxtaposition between the serious and the absurd is an important dialog for me. It’s much easier to latch onto the later and ignore the rest. That’s what gets frustrating. But again, I shouldn’t let it get to me. There so many amazing musicians that never get a chance to share their music with anyone and I’m insanely grateful and humbled by how many people like my music. Complaining about my “image in the media” is like saying “there aren’t enough sprinkles in my ice cream cone! I wish I could have more cake! etc, etc”

You’ve built quite a reputation as a live act and you’re coming back to Dublin in June, this time you’re bringing an ensemble of musicians. How is this going to impact on the live show, are you planning on staying on the floor or playing on stage. Will the games/dance offs/etc. still be a part of the gig? Will the band just be playing ‘Bromst’ material or will they be playing new arrangements from older songs?

I live show will certainly have gone through a transformation by the time I get to Dublin. I don’t plan on removing any of group activities from the show. I’m not sure if I’ll continue to play on the floor. The main reason I started playing on the floor was to communicate to the audience (which used to be really fucking small). Now that its gotten to the point when I need to ask people to step back and I can’t face the audience because I need to block off my equipment, it seems like that communication aspect has been lost. I like being in the crowd and I’m trying to come up with a way to make both worlds work. I also need to make sure I can see the performers and give cues and some of the instruments I play are on the stage because they are being shared by others. So I’m not exactly sure what the setup will be but I’ll have 7 weeks in the US before coming cover to the EU to figure it out.

Entirely self indulgent and geeky question. What’s your favourite piece of musical equipment?

Most likely these two modified whammy pedals I have just built. My friend Karl Ekdahl is an electronics wizard and turned them into really amazing instruments.

Following on from that in general what sort of gear do you use most when making music?

I compose mainly with the program Reason but I’ve been using Sibelius as well. I used to do everything by hand but it took forever and since I compose mainly on the road using the computer makes it earlier. I promised myself I’d soon compose at least two large pieces (or albums, whatever) of music made with out computer. I use it to much. I think its a great tool but there are a lot of other great instruments out there that I should be giving attention too.

One of the more surreal things I’ve seen in the internet in the past 12 months was a link to a video on YouTube featuring you that a friend sent me. How in the hell did you wind up on an NBC morning show in Ohio at 5:30 AM?

The world works in wonders in weird ways.

Bromst is out now on Carpark Records. Foggy Notions presents Dan Deacon & Ensemble in Andrew’s Lane Theatre on June 3rd.Photo used above by John Sisk.

The Analogue Hour - 25/3/09

Here’s the playlist for last night’s show. I’m really digging the new St Vincent song ‘The Strangers’, I can’t wait until I get my hands on the full album ‘Actor’ - out May 5th on 4AD. Cryptacize are pretty funky too, a collaborative project between Chris Cohen (The Curtains, ex-Deerhoof) and Nedelle Torrisi. To be honest, a couple of the tracks that far away from Deerhoof’s sound. Overall Cryptacize are a lot more relaxed than Deerhoof. Cryptacize’s second album is out on Asthmatic Kitty on the 21st of April. You can download a few tracks over on the Asthmatic Kitty site.

The Analogue Hour
25/3/2009

Share
Cymbals Eat Guitars
Why there are mountains

The CN tower belongs to the dead
Final Fantasy
Has a good home

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Love will tear us apart
Nouvelle Vague
Nouvelle Vague

Kicked it in the sun
Built to spill
Perfect from now on

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Cheerleader
Grizzly Bear
Veckatimest

Mythical Creatures
Groom
At the Natural History Museum

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Blue Tears
Cryptacize
Mythomania

The Strangers
St. Vincent
Actor

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Vancouver
Jeff Buckley
Sketches For My Sweetheart the Drunk

Six Pack
Dirty Projectors
Rise Above

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Happy Up Here
Royksopp
Junior

Woof Woof
Dan Deacon
Bromst

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Brothersport
Animal Collective
Merriweather Post Pavilion

The Analogue Hour goes out 7-8pm every Wednesday on RTE’s new DAB alternative music station 2XM. You can listen on a DAB radio and online here. The show is repeated on Sundays 12-1pm.

Happy Slapper

As part of RTE’s new Storyland web drama competition, ten production companies were each given a limited budget to produce a first episode of a potential series and then after a public vote, the successful candidates will go on to make their next episode.

I was asked to be Music Supervisor by Screenworks for their short ‘Happy Slapper’. They wanted to use all Irish music so I picked a variety of songs by Irish musicians which I thought would gel well with the dark script of Happy Slapper. In the end, we whittled it down to just three songs ‘Something Growing’ by Katie Kim, ‘Multipass’ by Patrick Kelleher and ‘Cloud’ by Hunter Gatherer. As it’s only 7 minutes long, the songs aren’t used in full but what does features fits excellently.

I can’t embed the version that’s up on the RTE website so here’s the Directors cut:

Please head over the Storyland site and vote to get ‘Happy Slapper’ through to the second round. Voting is open until the 30th of March at 5pm.

Brand new Camera Obscura video - French Navy

What a song, what a video! The combination of crooning heartbroken vocals and uplifting strings makes it a brilliantly addictive pop song to be reckoned with. ‘French Navy’ is out on April 13th on 7″, CD and as a download. Camera Obscura’s new album ‘My Maudlin Career’ is out a week later on the 20th of April. Camera Obscura play the Stiff Kitchen in Belfast on the 29th of April and Dublin’s Andrew’s Lane on the 30th of April.

Listen to the new album’s title track:

Surf City - Dickshakers Union

Surf City are a rockin’ lo-fi four piece from New Zealand that make some brilliant upbeat dance-along pop songs. Check em out on myspace.

Hopefully Life Will….

Hopefully Life Will…. is the title of Dubliner Stephen Tunney’s debut album. Recorded with “a cheap karaoke microphone and a bad quality laptop mic” Tunney’s album is definitely a Lo Fi affair, lyrically and vocally reminiscent of early Elliot Smith but also brimming with Built To Spill-esq riffs and dynamics. While Tunney clearly wears his influences on his sleeves he also brings plenty to the ensemble, unabashedly pouring his soul into soaring songs about love, life and growing up.

Stand out tracks include ‘Niall’s Planet’, ‘Should Go’ and a stomper called ‘Nightlife (First and Last)’ which features additional musicians Ciarán Hoogendoorn, David Geraghty and Aidan Wall (aka Porn On Vinyl). While the production is a little patchy in places, Tunney is the first to admit that “recording on a budget laptop is difficult…” quickly following that up to humbly say - “I just hope the message got through.” For one listener, the message reads loud and clear, ‘Stephen Tunney is here, he’s written some fantastic pop songs and there’s plenty more where that came from’.

Download Hopefully Life Will…

The Ears of Town - A Plugd Records documentary

The lads over at the Bubble have put together a really nice short documentary on Plugd Records, Cork’s finest independent record shop. Whenever I dropped copies of Analogue into the shop, Albert and guys were always really supportive of what we were doing. After driving 300 odd Km to rainy Cork (often on my own), it was nice to meet a friendly encouraging face in Plugd. The community spirit and banter in the shop is something special, as Aoife also attests.

The Ears of the Town: Plugd records from John Callaghan on Vimeo.

Dan Deacon - Bromst

Dan Deacon
Bromst
Carpark records

Last year, Baltimore experimentalist Dan Deacon made it clear in an interview with the American music press that he isn’t comfortable with the label ‘wacky’, and that perhaps those applying it to him were more bothered with his physical appearance than his music. Well Dan, you make it hard for us, so hard. If we discount the fact that the man wears gigantic neon pink spectacles, backward baseball caps and garish t-shirts a size or three too small for him, there is the small issue of his music so far; a heavy feed of mangled indie rave dressed up with chipmunk voices and the odd sample of woody woodpecker going wa-ka-ka-ka-ka! From where I’m standing, ‘wacky’ never seemed a million miles off the mark. Sure, I always thought it was brilliant too. But it is definitely an acquired taste (more often than not acquired after one of his revelatory live shows), and well yeah, ‘wacky’.

When at the same time Deacon announced that his next offering would be ‘darker’ than Spiderman of the Rings, one might have imagined him dreaming up a negative of that album, a gloomy 8-bit cathedral of dying screams, stuttering beats and dying woodpeckers. Instead, we get Bromst, an album that is both technically and melodically stunning but about as dark as Michael Jackson’s milky bum bum. Songs like ‘Woof Woof’ and ‘Red F’ utilize Deacon’s familiar funhouse structure of building sonic chaos around addictive samples, but up the warm fuzzy stakes by using more analogue equipment. There is certainly a greater variation in instrumentation at work and a tricksier command of melody and tempo than we’ve seen before from the man, especially during the gentler part of ‘snookered’ and ‘slow with horns/run for your life’. But don’t let any of that fool you. For every slow bit, there is a bit like the end of ‘Woof Woof’ where you can hear synths, kazoos and voices saying ‘quack’ all at once. This album is, at heart, the usual big flashing primary coloured barrel of reprogrammed nintendos having sex with each other we’ve come to expect from Deacon. And it is mostly great. There’s just one thing though. What is the fucking story with the old Irish folk sample on “Wet Wings’?

Bromst is due out on the 24th of March. Dan Deacon plays Andrews Lane Theatre on June 3rd.

Album swap - So Cow vs. Estel

In this album swap, Tuam’s So Cow was paired up with Aonghus McEvoy, a member of Dublin bands Estel and Drainland.

Love Visions
No Bunny
1-2-3-4 Go! Records (2008)

So Cow on why he chose this album to swap:
The dumbest, saddest, jumpiest party album in the world. Nobunny is 80% man 20% rabbit mask. Goofy power pop from a yearning preacher. Chuck Berry Holiday is the best pop song this decade. Nobunny loves you and should be in Europe sometime this year.

Aonghus (Estel) says:
No Bunny? With a name like that I was a little worried I’d have to sit through thirty minutes of ironic, yelpy, casio-worshipping horseshit. Thankfully on ‘Love Visions’, No Bunny fire through twelve fuzzed-out songs that bring bands like The Ramones to mind (I guess the reference on the cover gave that away). However, this doesn’t fall into the retro camp; weird little effects and drum machine parts dotted around the album give it a more modern sound, creating the kind of spazzy, naive atmosphere that treads just on the right side of insincerity. Consciously writing songs with this kind of feel usually makes me view bands as snot-nosed, too smart for their own good hipsters that need to fuck off back to 1998 and leave their in-jokes there, but it really works on ‘Love Visions’. Maybe this is because a sense of fun pervades throughout the record, the songs are well constructed, catchy, and most importantly, a sense of enthusiasm is present.

Although this wouldn’t be the kind of record I’d usually pick up, any listener will immediately notice the focused song writing within. Very few tracks hit the three minute mark, no riffs are overplayed, anything that’s present works, and functions well within the overall structure of the album. The problem with many straight ahead albums is that they can be repetitive and lacking ideas, by the fourth or fifth song your mind starts to wander and you begin to look around for another record. Keeping the length of ‘Love Visions’ to a bare minimum has served No Bunny well, the album can be easily digested as a whole and leaves you wanting more rather than forcing the listener to file it away for another six months. ‘Love Visions’ isn’t a life changer, but still worth giving a listen if you’re lacking some really fun music. The guy also wears a rabbit mask, cool.

Bright Surroundings Dark Beginnings
Sun City Girls
Majora (1993)

Aonghus on why he chose this album to swap:
‘Bright Surroundings Dark Beginnings’ first tore my mind apart at the tender age of seventeen. In hindsight I might describe this Lp as a punk rock take on the master musicians of Joujouka but I don’t know if that comes close to the mark, or even does either party any justice. This is totally primitive psychedelica that will drill a hole into your skull and blast further and further into your confused little brain.

So Cow says:
A few facts. I’ve just finished listening to this right through for the third time. I’ve had two previous brushes with Sun City Girls. I met one of them on the street in Galway in 2003. He was bearded wildly and wearing a WFMU shirt. The second time was in Montreal last year. We played the same festival, Suoni Per Il Popolo, at the same time on the same night, across the road from each other. I can’t claim to know their stuff at all. That’s the state of play going in to this.

Side A is one track, 22 minutes of what is called ‘The Venerable Song (The Meaning Of Which Is No Longer Known)’. We’re two minutes in and, due to experiences at the coalface of early-millennium instrumental rock, I’m all expectations of build. The riff is steady. Percussion fills out the stereo field. The cymbals and clicks remind me of traditional Far Eastern music I’ve encountered. I base that on nothing but obvious similarities. There’s plenty chanting and gurgling, in a language I’m going to assume is made-up bollocks. A number of times there is build and force and my Pavlovian Slintnipples harden but SCG pull the rug pretty quick. 10 minutes in, Sun City Girls-drummer-dude starts going for the toms and it feels like all manner of hell is about to break loose. It doesn’t. Glockenspiel and a recorder enter the fray. The made-up bollocks gets more frenzied at times, like a particularly dramatic episode of a Korean period drama.

Side B is two tracks, both titles of which are going to eat into my word count. Things on this side are gloomier and more exotic, middle eastern guitar flourishes, awesome percussion and, on ‘Omani Red Light’, what sounds like a bagpipe being played through a tin whistle. Things get quiet, track titles change and ‘Multiple Hallucinations Of An Assassin’ starts with some routine stretching before chugging and tripping its way to an end, the last three minutes of which are particularly ace.

The mp3 player plays on. ‘Paperhouse’ by Can starts up, which a more articulate man or woman could wrap up with the previous two paragraphs in a fanciful description, using the word continuum at some point. But I’m a bit thick like that, so I’ll just say I enjoyed the listen a lot.

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