Hello readers! As you know Juan Maclean will be performing (DJ SET) alongside Simian Mobile Disco For the NEON festival this March 18th! We asked him a couple of questions about Montreal and also his gig at SAT.
Just for you ;) !
Dukes.
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BIOGRAPHY
"It's been a bit of a sore spot., laughs Juan Maclean, "sitting on this album and seeing this robot stuff pop up all over the place. I have serious robot credentials that go back years and years. Like, a decade! But Daft Punk beat me to the punch." He may be joking, but the man's right. If anyone's earned the right to call their debut album 'Less Than Human' and imagine a love triangle consisting of a man, a woman and the man's gay robot friend (as in 'Shining Skinned Friend'), it's Maclean.
He was guitarist and synth player with acclaimed but obscure, gonzo electro-punk band Six Finger Satellite, who began formulating their blend of rigidly mechanised disco beats, oddly sumptuous synth melodies and razor-shredded guitar work in the early 90s. The brutish but groovy result suggested a cross between Devo, Kraftwerk and Big Black. Then, America was mired in grunge, the famous French robots were still in short pants and the 'punk-funk revival' was in the unimaginable future. Six Finger Satellite were just too far ahead of their time and perished accordingly.
As a result, Juan MacLean nearly gave up. Not just on music, but on life itself. Creative disillusionment and personal despair aggravated by years of drug addiction (he started shooting coke at an early age, then moved on to heroin) had, toward the end of last century, brought him to his knees. Then, as the world prepared to party at the millenium's turn, two shifts occurred. First, he quit Six Finger Satellite, got the hell out of New York City and decided to try doing something rather more socially constructive with his life than just playing in a band. Secondly, he found himself being bugged by Six Finger Satellite's former live soundman. But this guy wasn’t after money or the return of borrowed gear or any one of the countless other things that usually prompt such reconnections. MacLean was being hassled by his old friend James Murphy to start making music again.
"From the very beginning," explains Maclean, "I always made a promise to myself that when I thought the time for Six Finger Satellite was up in terms of creativity, then I would just quit. I thought it was better to go out in a blaze of glory, rather than make five more albums nobody cared about. ” Maclean quit in 1988, just one month before their final LP, 'Law of Ruins' (produced by Murphy) was due to be released. "I was just so sick of it," he claims. "I was burned out from going on tour, plus it had just stopped being interesting, so I sold all my equipment. I thought I'd never have anything to do with making music again."
With that in mind MacLean moved to New Hampshire, where he lives now. He cleaned up, studied for a degree and began teaching English in a young offenders' institute (he spent time in such places as a kid), which he does still and describes as "pretty fun." Meanwhile, his enthusiasm for music had been reignited by (a pre-DFA) Murphy and Tim Goldsworthy. "They'd mail me CD's of things they thought were good," recalls Maclean, "and the three of us started having this dialogue again about older dance music that we'd always liked - Kraftwerk, house and techno." Goldsworthy also introduced Maclean to music that we’d always liked – Kraftwerk, house and techno.” Goldsworthy also introduced MacLean to the work of experimentalists like Autechre and, although he found it “very calculated and intellectualised,” it did help get him excited about music again. So much so, that in 2000 he bought a computer and sampler. “The real breakthrough,” according to MacLean, “came when I took Herbie Hancock’s ‘Rockit’ – which was one of my favourite records when I was like, 13 – and attempted to rip it off. The result was ‘By The Time I Get To Venus,’ because at the time, I just wasn’t good enough to get that close!” That track became the debut 12-inch by The Juan MacLean and one of the first singles released by DFA.
‘Less Than Human’ refines what that tentative first effort only hinted at. It’s a precision-tuned rekindling of MacLean’s love affair with everything from Kraftwerk to Juan Atkins and Derrick May, Funkadelic to Giorgio Moroder and Lipps Inc, DAF to Talking Heads and Frankie Goes To Hollywood. It’s full of tics (sin drums, cow bells, Bootsy Collins bass lines, Moog Liberation motifs) borrowed from dance music history, but refuses to engage with retroism, nostalgia or any notion of ‘the classic.’ Opener ‘AD2003’ tracks back to Kraftwerk via Orbital, buoyed up by bubbles of percolating glitch. ‘Give Me Every Little Thing’ rewinds through Underworld and Talking Heads en route to Studio 54. ‘Tito’s Way’ contrasts acid-house synth squelches and rave whistles with clattering, tribal percussion. There’s a constant, though. Even the LP’s euphoric epic – 14-minute, piano-decorated closer ‘Dance With Me’, sung by LCD Soundsystem’s Nancy Whang – is poignantly subdued, touched by a melancholy that reflects MacLean’s own world view. “It doesn’t seem incongruous to me to have a lot of that stuff in there,” he says of the album’s sadness, “because I made a big effort to make an album, rather than a collection of tunes with just one good track that everybody knows. So I never really set out to say, ‘this is a song that will played for the dance floor,’ or whatever.
“When I started on it, I don’t think I had any pre-conceived notions at all, except that I knew I’d always be operating under the same aesthetic principles that I’d held in making music my whole life. For example, I started taking old multi-track, Six Finger Satellite recording tapes and I sampled all the drums from them – that’s most of the drum tracks you hear.” For the rest, there’s a live drummer, flute, guitar, synths, piano and vocals – no samples. “I might spend months and months on one track,” MacLean explains, “and we have a lot of live instrumentation on it, so a lot of things that sound like samples are actually me playing.”
As to the DFA connection, MacLean declares that working without Murphy and Goldsworthy was never an option. “Even now, if I weren’t going to work with James and Tim, I just wouldn’t be doing this at all. The thing that James does is something that he and I had been formulating for years and years, when I was in Six Finger Satellite – his recording techniques, his approach, the determination that he was going to put out the best thing he could possibly put out, or else it just wasn’t going to be put out. . . we spent every day and night together on tour for years, talking about recording – there was never a question of doing it with anyone else. I don’t need to be working with James because, in an engineering sense, we both do the same thing, but working with both James and Tim, it’s three people sitting there going, ‘that’s no good, that’s no good,’ and maybe one in three things will be passed by all three of us. It’s a really tough jury – the toughest – but I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
(Source: www.residentadvisor.net)
He was guitarist and synth player with acclaimed but obscure, gonzo electro-punk band Six Finger Satellite, who began formulating their blend of rigidly mechanised disco beats, oddly sumptuous synth melodies and razor-shredded guitar work in the early 90s. The brutish but groovy result suggested a cross between Devo, Kraftwerk and Big Black. Then, America was mired in grunge, the famous French robots were still in short pants and the 'punk-funk revival' was in the unimaginable future. Six Finger Satellite were just too far ahead of their time and perished accordingly.
As a result, Juan MacLean nearly gave up. Not just on music, but on life itself. Creative disillusionment and personal despair aggravated by years of drug addiction (he started shooting coke at an early age, then moved on to heroin) had, toward the end of last century, brought him to his knees. Then, as the world prepared to party at the millenium's turn, two shifts occurred. First, he quit Six Finger Satellite, got the hell out of New York City and decided to try doing something rather more socially constructive with his life than just playing in a band. Secondly, he found himself being bugged by Six Finger Satellite's former live soundman. But this guy wasn’t after money or the return of borrowed gear or any one of the countless other things that usually prompt such reconnections. MacLean was being hassled by his old friend James Murphy to start making music again.
"From the very beginning," explains Maclean, "I always made a promise to myself that when I thought the time for Six Finger Satellite was up in terms of creativity, then I would just quit. I thought it was better to go out in a blaze of glory, rather than make five more albums nobody cared about. ” Maclean quit in 1988, just one month before their final LP, 'Law of Ruins' (produced by Murphy) was due to be released. "I was just so sick of it," he claims. "I was burned out from going on tour, plus it had just stopped being interesting, so I sold all my equipment. I thought I'd never have anything to do with making music again."
With that in mind MacLean moved to New Hampshire, where he lives now. He cleaned up, studied for a degree and began teaching English in a young offenders' institute (he spent time in such places as a kid), which he does still and describes as "pretty fun." Meanwhile, his enthusiasm for music had been reignited by (a pre-DFA) Murphy and Tim Goldsworthy. "They'd mail me CD's of things they thought were good," recalls Maclean, "and the three of us started having this dialogue again about older dance music that we'd always liked - Kraftwerk, house and techno." Goldsworthy also introduced Maclean to music that we’d always liked – Kraftwerk, house and techno.” Goldsworthy also introduced MacLean to the work of experimentalists like Autechre and, although he found it “very calculated and intellectualised,” it did help get him excited about music again. So much so, that in 2000 he bought a computer and sampler. “The real breakthrough,” according to MacLean, “came when I took Herbie Hancock’s ‘Rockit’ – which was one of my favourite records when I was like, 13 – and attempted to rip it off. The result was ‘By The Time I Get To Venus,’ because at the time, I just wasn’t good enough to get that close!” That track became the debut 12-inch by The Juan MacLean and one of the first singles released by DFA.
‘Less Than Human’ refines what that tentative first effort only hinted at. It’s a precision-tuned rekindling of MacLean’s love affair with everything from Kraftwerk to Juan Atkins and Derrick May, Funkadelic to Giorgio Moroder and Lipps Inc, DAF to Talking Heads and Frankie Goes To Hollywood. It’s full of tics (sin drums, cow bells, Bootsy Collins bass lines, Moog Liberation motifs) borrowed from dance music history, but refuses to engage with retroism, nostalgia or any notion of ‘the classic.’ Opener ‘AD2003’ tracks back to Kraftwerk via Orbital, buoyed up by bubbles of percolating glitch. ‘Give Me Every Little Thing’ rewinds through Underworld and Talking Heads en route to Studio 54. ‘Tito’s Way’ contrasts acid-house synth squelches and rave whistles with clattering, tribal percussion. There’s a constant, though. Even the LP’s euphoric epic – 14-minute, piano-decorated closer ‘Dance With Me’, sung by LCD Soundsystem’s Nancy Whang – is poignantly subdued, touched by a melancholy that reflects MacLean’s own world view. “It doesn’t seem incongruous to me to have a lot of that stuff in there,” he says of the album’s sadness, “because I made a big effort to make an album, rather than a collection of tunes with just one good track that everybody knows. So I never really set out to say, ‘this is a song that will played for the dance floor,’ or whatever.
“When I started on it, I don’t think I had any pre-conceived notions at all, except that I knew I’d always be operating under the same aesthetic principles that I’d held in making music my whole life. For example, I started taking old multi-track, Six Finger Satellite recording tapes and I sampled all the drums from them – that’s most of the drum tracks you hear.” For the rest, there’s a live drummer, flute, guitar, synths, piano and vocals – no samples. “I might spend months and months on one track,” MacLean explains, “and we have a lot of live instrumentation on it, so a lot of things that sound like samples are actually me playing.”
As to the DFA connection, MacLean declares that working without Murphy and Goldsworthy was never an option. “Even now, if I weren’t going to work with James and Tim, I just wouldn’t be doing this at all. The thing that James does is something that he and I had been formulating for years and years, when I was in Six Finger Satellite – his recording techniques, his approach, the determination that he was going to put out the best thing he could possibly put out, or else it just wasn’t going to be put out. . . we spent every day and night together on tour for years, talking about recording – there was never a question of doing it with anyone else. I don’t need to be working with James because, in an engineering sense, we both do the same thing, but working with both James and Tim, it’s three people sitting there going, ‘that’s no good, that’s no good,’ and maybe one in three things will be passed by all three of us. It’s a really tough jury – the toughest – but I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
(Source: www.residentadvisor.net)
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INTERVIEW: Juan Maclean (by Omar Diouf + Alexander Leblanc)
DUKES: Hello Juan! First of all…we are here to talk about Music, a passion we all share so what I want to ask you is, how did you first get into production/DJ and what still motivates you to do it today?
I have been involved in production since I was about 19 years old. I became interested in recording at a young age, and opened a recording studio in the early 90's with my first band, Six Finger Satellite. At some point I became pretty burned out with it and left music altogether for a few years.
One thing that enticed me back into production was that with dance music I could work alone and work at any time I wanted, without the hassles of dealing with a bunch of other people. After my first 12," By The Time I Get To Venus, came out, I immediately starting getting offers to DJ, so that is when I starting taking it seriously and playing outside the confines of my bedroom, around 2002.
I am still as excited about it today as I ever have been. Though I grew up with rock music, the limitations of a rock band setup make it inherently limited in terms of creativity. At some point, if you stick around too long, you start trying to branch out and make things more complicated. This is the death of a good rock band. For example, I seem to be in the extreme minority of people who don't give a shit about Radiohead. It just sounds like pedestrian electronic music to me, rock guys being impressed by production stuff that sounds very 10-years-ago to me.
DUKES: What is the perfect setting for Juan’s music to come to life? In other words, what’s your ideal spot for producing?
Isolation has been a key to my most successful productions. I do best when I am removed from my usual surroundings, and particularly from the trappings of the city. For my last album, we rented a studio that was in a house in upstate New York for basic tracking. I took my band up there, and it is a very rural setting, so we spent our days swimming in rivers and our nights making music. It's the only way I can clear my head and just go for it. If I were walking around Williamsburg every day while trying to make an album, I would be second-guessing myself constantly.
DUKES: Have you ever been to Montreal before? What have you heard about our scene here? Compared to the US or Europe?
Of course, I have been to Montreal many times. To me, Montreal has a bit more European feel to it, whereas a city like Toronto reminds me of a smaller New York City.
DUKES: What would you say has been your favorite gig ever? at least the one you can remember because I know the list is LONG
I can never answer this question with confidence because there have been 1,000's of gigs at this point in my life. In terms of recent DJ gigs, last year I was playing at Space in Ibiza on the night that Spain won the world cup. They had set up an enormous cinema sized screen in one of the main rooms, and a couple of thousand people were watching the match before the gig started. I was waiting nervously in the main room as the opening DJ played to a totally empty room, dreading the prospect of Spain losing the match. At one point the bartenders started screaming, hugging each other and crying, jumping up and down, and I knew Spain had won. By they time I played, I felt invincible. People were just ecstatic, chanting my name during breakdowns, it was rapturous. There was just so much good feeling, a couple of thousand people in rapture, the ultimate setting for a dj, particularly a House music dj.
DUKES: Which upcoming artist would you say is an inspiration nowadays in electronic music?
I can't nail it down to one artist, and I think this is because the defining format in dance music is the 12." So you have people making one amazing 12," and then you might never hear from them again. However, I am very much inspired by labels. Right now one of my favorites is Cécille, which is run by Nick Curly, who is also one of my favorite dj's. Cécille has put out a series of amazing 12"'s, I probably have a half dozen of them in my record bag at any time. Their stuff tends to be deep and dark, but also very soulful.
DUKES: How is the tour with Simian coming along so far? How does the collab work?
It hasn't started yet. I think Blondes are opening, and then I play right before SMD. I am the only one who is DJ'ing, so I'm I a bit of a peculiar position. I'll only be on for about 45 minutes, which is a very odd position to be in as a dj, so I think I might have some sort of visual accompaniment, I'm still working it out now.
DUKES: Any new projects coming up?
I have an Acid House project that will be releasing some 12"'s on DFA; it's called Love Acid. Other than that, I am writing new material for my next album, which will come out in the spring of 2012.
For More info About the gig make sure you RSVP on the event page :
Other info :
| RA DJ Page / | residentadvisor.net/dj/juanmaclean |
| Website / | www.thejuanmaclean.com |
| Discogs / | discogs.com/artist/juan+maclean |
| Buy releases / | Juno Records / Juno Download |
LOVE IT !
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