The Juan MacLean

Still riding the wave of his excellent The Future Will Come, The Juan MacLean was in town to grace the Heineken Expressions tour and show the masses at Tripod what disco sounded like before nu-disco. Having spent much of the year touring with his live show, and then took off across Europe on a two-week DJ tour. All of this travelling might get a little dull, but he has ways of keeping himself occupied. “That’s how I spend most of my time, reading. My favourite thing of the year is probably The Road, the Cormac McCarthy book. Right now I’m reading a book by James Ellroy. His newest book just came out, called Clothes Like Blood or something [Blood's a Rover], it’s like 1000 pages or something. It’s part of a trilogy that started with American Tabloid, it’s in the late 60s.” For the uninitiated, have a look at this clip of Ellroy on Conan O’Brien a decade ago.

Juan had just come from playing Manchester’s Warehouse Project alongside Erol Alkan, Aeroplane and more, a popular fixture on the UK clubbing calendar. “It was good. I think there was like 1800 people. It was just rammed with people, big huge space packed with people. I asked to be in the small room actually. I hate those big main rooms. It’s not as fun.” I asked him how that show compared to April’s gig in The Deaf Institute. “I thought they were pretty similar. That show at The Deaf Institute was good. Just really packed with people who seemed really into it, having a good time. I like smaller places better, but it’s hard because they want you in a bigger room a lot of the time. I think it’s so much more fun playing in smaller, like 500 capacity is nice. When you get up to big huge empty room, well, not empty, spaces that are more wide open, sometimes it doesn’t sound very good.”

The Future Will Come, as is probably clear from my many posts on the subject, is my favourite album this year, but it works just as well on club speakers as it does on headphones. Making an album and directing it towards one particular experience is obviously something that requires very careful attention. “It’s a big issue that I think a lot about. It comes down to making in album, I don’t really about dancefloor atmosphere. I’d rather make something that you could listen to at home. So on my album there’s a lot of shorter, more pop structured songs, and then I think 12″s are the best to reserve for longer, loopier, more dancefloor-friendly things. That’s always been my philosophy.” The Future Will Come works best, in my opinion, because of the balance between short and snappy songs like One Day and dark, twisted, eight-miunute burners like The Simple Life - but not everyone can get that balance right. “I think it’s always the downfall of electronic musicians - some of my favourite 12″s of all time, like those artists will go on to make albums and they just don’t work very well at all. I think 12″s and albums are two entirely different things, albums that are just collections of instrumental tracks are really hard to do. Like the first Field album [From Here We Go Sublime] I love, I think it’s great. But a lot of the time it just doesn’t work.”

One aspect of the album that is most interesting is the lyrical interplay between Juan and DFA stalwart Nancy Whang. Happiness, heartbreak and every emotion in between feature in songs that seem to catalogue the peaks and troughs that affect every relationship. “That was pretty intentional. I think in dance music when people do have lyrics they tend to be throwaway, either party lyrics that are really meaningless, or really ironic things, or just really clever things, and Nancy and I sat down and just decided that we would try to write as personal, keep it very personal and honest as we could.” As far as Juan’s lyrics are concerned, they often seem to come from the point of view of a humanoid creature, devoid of emotion. “I think that’s kind of a stereotype that has a lot of truth to it in relationships in general. The guy is the one who more robotic and reserved and it’s always the girl who wants to be more emotional or something. So that’s why I’ve always used robots as a metaphor for that.” This robotic trope is turned on its head by Human Disaster, a bleak, desolate song that bares every hidden emotion, which precedes the epic Happy House. “Originally we had a sort of narrative arc to the album that we got away from for sequencing, but it was really a progression of two people coming together and growing apart, and coming back together again. I feel like it sort of getting bookended, in terms of vinyl, side one ends with the song Tonight, which is much more upbeat, happy, optimistic, and it was definitely ending with Happy House, to leave it on a positive, upbeat note.”

Getting back to the live show, Juan recently went into great detail about his setup for Resident Advisor’s Machine Love. I asked him to break that down for a layperson. “It’s hard, how much of a layperson? I think the best way to put it, now, most people in electronic music work entirely inside a computer, using software, synthesisers, all the sounds come from inside the computer, and everything I do is outside the computer, starting with live drums, and actually big collection of synths, and live playing of the instrument, I think that’s the most identifiable quality to it.” Bands like Holy Ghost! have talked about how difficult it’ll be for them to start touring, with the extensive setup they use, but they’re not the only ones. “It’s a big issue because it’s very expensive, especially when you start flying, it’s hard to get all the gear around. We’re in the same boat. Because we actually play all these synths and instruments, there’s a lot of stuff to carry around. Basically it’s a lot more engaging, a live show, than people getting up with a laptop and turning it on.” I recounted to him an experience last year when I saw Ulrich Schnauss start a show only for his laptop to crash within seconds of starting. “That’s embarrassing too. There was a Junior Boys show in New York, in Webster Hall, really big, like 1200 capacity place, and after the first song all their stuff crashed and they had to cancel the show. That terrifies me, I don’t ever want to have that happen. But everyone on DFA, LCD Soundsystem, you know, Hercules and Love Affair, we all carry around all this gear. I think it’s a standard at DFA that’s been established, you’re going to have a proper band.”

All of his recent singles have featured what can only be termed glorious remixes - Surkin, Matthew Dear and The Emperor Machine to name but three. “I usually try to go off the beaten path a little bit. I do so many remixes myself as well, I like the idea of having different things for DJs to play basically. Which is always what I think the point of any remix is, to have something for DJs to play.” And his favourite? “God, that’s a tough one. I think surprisingly it’s the One Day remix by Mark Romboy, which was really, people think of as a weird choice, but I thought it was amazing.”

A recent interview revealed a past spent teaching teenage delinquents in detention centres. Is this something that could follow a successful music career? “I don’t know, I think about it all the time. It’s so hard to say. Some days I think I’ll do it till I’m like 60. Then other days I think I can’t do it anymore, I don’t know. I played with Alexander Robotnick the other night, he’s like 68 or something. He’s 68 and he’s jumping around and going crazy! And I thought “Wow, that’s pretty amazing”. I don’t know. It’s one of the things with electronic music, like dance music, as opposed to rock music, like when I played in an indie rock band, I was like “I definitely don’t want to be anywhere the age of 30 and doing this”, like I found it kind of embarrassing. But with dance music I think there’s a tradition of people being revered as they go on.” Why not instruct kids on how to make a break into the music industry? “I could, I’d like to, when I was teaching I set up an electronic music programme, that was really fun. In the United States it’s looked at as a luxury kind of thing, there’s never money for it.”

I guess all that can be said to that is that, well, the future will come…

The Heineken Expression tour continues at The Classic in Cork on November 13, with Shit Robot, Dancepig and more. See here for more details.