1. Your new album is called The Future Will Come. What kind of future do you foresee?

I think sci-fi author William Gibson is a visionary in terms of imagining what the future will look like. In general, it is a future in which corporate culture has permeated every aspect of life. Ostensibly major corporations are the ruling powers, in place of government. Even personal identity is dominated by corporate references and allegiances. So maybe the next Juan MacLean album will be part of a Wal Mart advert campaign, if I wait too long between albums again.

2. What were you listening when you were making it?

I made up a playlist of things to intentionally groom myself with before and during the making of the album. Some of the things on this daily playlist were: Grace Jones, Human League, Kraftwerk, lots of 90′s piano house, lots of 80′s synth pop in general, Brain Eno, Can, Cris and Cosey, Ministry, New Order.

3. What is the song (of the last album) you enjoy the most playing live?

Happy House. We usually play it as the last song, with the entire set sort of building up to it. It is by far the most fun for us to play, and we end it as an incredible acid jam that can be extended for as long as we’d like. We did a show once where people were screaming for it as soon as we got on stage, so we just started with Happy House and played it for 45 minutes and left the stage. People were crying by the end, they were so excited, but I also think there was a lot of ecstacy going around.

Click here to view the embedded video.

4. Do you think The Future Will Come is an album meant to be listened to or to be danced to?

I made a conscious effort to make an album that was meant to be more of a ‘listened to’ thing than a ‘danced to’ one. Obviously there are a couple of dance oriented tracks, like The Simple Life and Happy House, but we tried to have it be an album of shorter, more vocal oriented pop songs. In general I think entire LP’s consisting of dance tracks tend to be boring, especially when there are no vocals. We made a very conscious effort to sequence the album so that it was engaging listening experience from beginning to end.

5. What should we expect from your live show?

I think the most important thing to understand is that The Juan MacLean is a proper live band. There are no laptops, we are all playing live instruments. There are four of us playing live keyboards and percussion, and singing of course. We have the greatest drummer in the world, Jerry Fuchs (who also played in bands like Turing Machine, !!!, and now Maserati). Much of the set rests on his shoulders, he really carries the band in a big way. It is like live dance music with the feel of a rock band, a bit more chaotic and hard hitting, with room for improvisation so we can stretch things out.

6. What has been the best concert in your present tour? Why?

We just headlined the Brooklyn Electronic Music festival, and that was phenomenal. It was in the middle of Brooklyn, at an old warehouse, though our stage was outdoors. It was meant to be like an old school rave, and people just went insane when we played. The police came 5 seperate times, demanding that our sound engineer turn it down. He would turn it down a bit, then as soon as they walked away he would turn it up again. In the middle of our last song they physically removed him from the soundboard and hauled him off. We had to go bail him out later on.

7. Tell us 3 good things of working with Nancy. (And one bad? –if that is possible)

1. Nancy has this amazing ability to take an instrumental track she’s been given and transform it into something transcendent. For example, she took Happy House, which on an instrumental level is a fairly standard House track, and turned into a completely uplifting anthem. Another great example is Dance With Me from Less Than Human. Her performance on that track is a tearjerker.

2. She insists on finding healthy food when we are on tour. Jerry and DJ (our keyboard player), eat terribly, a steady diet of alcohol, cocaine, and junk food. Nancy, however, demands that we drive out of our way to find health food stores.

3. She has a wardrobe that can save a show. No matter what is happening during a show, if equipment has broken down or the police have come or the stage is surrounded by hippies doing the Noodle Dance, Nancy is always dressed in the most fascinating and visually engaging outfits, so you always have something to hold your attention.

4. And finally, in terms of ‘bad,’ she is a total Diva. She demands a separate dressing room from the rest of us, and none of us have ever been allowed inside. One time the rest of us and our crew had to share a utility closet at a club, because there was only one dressing room and that was reserved for Nancy. Our ‘dressing room’ actually had a boiler/ water heater in it, so it was incredibly hot. By the time we played we were totally sweating, and all the alcohol had turned warm, so we were all pretty ruined. But she came charging out of her dressing room totally refreshed, carrying the scent of the fresh cut flowers that decorated the inside of it every night.

8. Is it true that you now have a robot mascot? What’s his name? Who made it and why?

Yes, he was built by Mike Vadino, who has been the main graphic designer/art director at DFA from the beginning, and Pat Mahoney, who is the drummer for James Murphy’s band The LCD Soundsystem. We engaged in a partnership with Nooka, a watch company that makes these watches that have non-traditional methods of telling time, and the robot was designed to celebrate the partnering of the futuristic band with the futuristic watch company. The robot is midi controlled and responds to information sent from our MPC. The robot’s name is Jeff.

9. When you look back, how do you see the music you were making with Six Finger Satellite?

Too far ahead of its time to ever gain any mass appeal. It’s quite funny now, in restrospect, as we were an angular guitar band featuring disco drum beats, cowbells, analog synths, and funky basslines, which is all de rigeur at your local indie dance night.

10. You’ve been into dance-punk, then swift into electronic music and eventually into more lyrics-based and “poppy” songs. What’s next? Are you already planning a new album, or we’ll have to wait as much as after Less Than Human?

I don’t really see it all as that much of a shift. It’s a more general tendency toward vocal oriented tracks. There is no way in hell I will wait 4 years to put out another album. James Murphy met with me recently and threatened to withhold all my earnings that he has been saving for me in a special account since the beginning of DFA if I waited too long. He is really good to me, actually. From the beginning, he said “Juan, you are not good with money, if we pay you your earnings you will just waste it all on drugs and food and stuff like that. I will open a special account and put all your royalties, advances, and other profits into it, and take out what I need for administrative purposes.” So he has this account that I am guessing must be pretty big by now. Although I sometimes wonder what these ‘administrative expenses’ are. One time we got in a big fight because we were in LA and we were clothes shopping and eating out at fancy restaurants, and I caught him paying for it with a credit card with my name on it. He said these were the aforementioned ‘administrative expenses,’ and I got mad. But I know he means well.

Click here to buy tickets to see The Juan Maclean LIVE on August 19th.

]]> http://www.cargo-london.com/blogs/2009/08/the-juan-maclean-interviewed/feed/ 3 http://www.cargo-london.com/blogs/2009/08/sci-fi-line-ups/ http://www.cargo-london.com/blogs/2009/08/sci-fi-line-ups/#comments Fri, 07 Aug 2009 15:51:44 +0000 Mila Dore http://www.cargo-london.com/blogs/?p=1484 We want you to imagine the future.
What will it be like? An underwater world? An Intergalactic hitchhiking trip that will answer the most unanswerable of questions? Will we all become lazy fat people as in Wall-E? A world where robots do our laundry or serve us our pint of beer? Or a planet full of sentient androids in the vein of Blade Runner? Would we end up booking these guys for an upcoming event at Cargo? Would we eventually need Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics? And, if we somehow manage to make robots follow our standard moral guidelines, would they turn out to become “better” than humans? – reducing you and me to an inferior species just above chimpanzees? Are we going to merge with machines!? Or… maybe all these disturbing theories are just bollocks and the only thing robots will ever do better than us is play baseball.

Make your own forecast. Place your bets. For the moment, robots are invading Cargo without our musical selectors even noticing it. On The 19th of August a man who has stated that he would like to be a cyborg will take over Cargo’s stage. The Juan Maclean with his brand new “The Future Will Come” (and his brand new robot mascot) will be playing blips and bleeps with his soul-less electronic machines (Theremin included) –along with some human beings.

Click here to view the embedded video.

On the other hand, the DFA Records crew will bring us the acid house and electro beats of the mighty Shit Robot on Sat. 22nd. And galaxies away, the night of the 26th of September we will be cheered up by our very special electronic jester Maurizo Dami, aka Alexander Robotnik, an old hand of the Italian bizarre music scene.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Be scared. The invasion has already started. And it’s going to be fun!