The Juan Maclean

Where did you make the new album? Was it a mixture of your home studio and the DFA studio again?

I always start everything at my home studio, alone. I’ll sketch out outlines for songs and compiled loops and riffs until I have 15 or so that I think are outstanding enough gestures to pursue further. Then I took a couple of weeks in the DFA studio, which is our home base in NYC. I had friends like [Holy Ghost! touring drummer] Jim Orso come in to lay down live drums, or Morgan Wiley of Midnight Magic to play keyboard parts, cycling through the arsenal of vintage synths in that studio. Alex Frankel of Holy Ghost! as well, he’s an old friend and I consult with him quite a bit. But those guys will come in and just play for like 20 minutes over loops I’ve written. I try to get as much as I can out of them, and I try to make it not so serious, because I’ve found that with ‘players’ like those guys, they give me the most useful stuff when they’re laughing while playing, just having a good time and not thinking too much.

I then go back to my studio and spend a couple of months sorting through all of these tracks. If Morgan lays down 15 minutes of stuff that he played just trying different angles, I might in the end grab a one-bar piece and use that, or combine two parts to make a new one. Though in a song like ‘A Simple Design,’ I kept every note of an epic three-minute-long SH-101 solo that Morgan played because it was really this remarkable composition that only made sense as a whole.

After I’d sorted through the basic tracking, I again roughed it all out into little compositions. Sometimes they were nearly formed songs, but sometimes just bare bones pieces. At this point the most important work took place. Over the course of about four months in the dead of winter I’d wake up every day and walk from Bed-Stuy to Nicholas Millhiser’s studio in Bushwick. Nick produced the album with me. He was a huge presence. When I initially asked him to help produce the album, I didn’t realise – and I don’t think he did – how much of a role he would end up playing, but I think it allowed him to be creative in a way that was outside the boundaries of his working relationship with Alex in Holy Ghost!. For example, Alex is a very accomplished keyboard player, so that’s really his territory in Holy Ghost! productions, but Nick ended up playing some fantastic synth parts on this record, I was very surprised.

But that walk to and from the studio is something I can’t disassociate from the making of this album. It was a terrible winter, cold and lots of snow, and I’d start each day walking a couple of miles through housing projects listening to the mixes. I think it influenced the album quite a bit in terms of its emotional tone. We’d work on one song at a time until it was ready for mixing, adding synth parts, percussion and vocals. Nancy would come in when we were ready for vocals, and the three of us together in the studio – all old friends who have played on each other’s records and on the road in each other’s bands – had a pretty magical working relationship for this record.

In the end, when songs were ready for mixing, we’d take the tracks back to the DFA studio and mix there, though we did end up mixing a couple at Nick’s studio.

The walk to and from the studio is something I can’t disassociate from the making of this album. It was a terrible winter, cold and lots of snow. I think it influenced the album quite a bit in terms of its emotional tone.

Can you tell us about the technology behind it? How much has your setup changed over the last few years? Were there any new additions which really helped to shape the way you created In A Dream?

Nick’s CS-80 ended up featured very prominently on this record. That is truly a magical synth, very emotive, a very vibe-heavy synth. I think it stirs up a lot of deeply buried Vangelis moments in me, especially Blade Runner references. There were a couple of new synths: an Oberheim OB-8 and a Prophet 08, of which I was quite skeptical but I’m now a fan. There’s a LinnDrum on ‘I’ve Waited For So Long.’ Also, I broke out the guitar again, a first for a The Juan MacLean recording.

Do you consider hardware to be a luxury or an essential in terms of your own process? Would you be able to achieve similar results with software equivalents in place of things like effects and synths?

I use hardware because it’s simply the thing that works for me and I know best. I don’t consider it a luxury by any means, though it is at the same time essential for me. I don’t consider it a luxury because I don’t think these are luxury items. I think people’s priorities have become very skewed. I’ll buy a synth for $1,000 and someone might say, ‘Oh, I wish I could afford to have an SH-101 too’. But I’ll point out that over the course of a year someone might spend more than that on weed or other drugs, or micro-brew beer, or cigarettes, or driving some expensive car. I don’t have much ‘stuff’ in other areas of my life – I tend to put my extra money into my studio. Every time I buy a new synth I get at least one new song out of it. In that sense it’s not a luxury, it’s a necessity if I’m going to expect to keep having a music career.

Everything up to The Future Will Come I made with a limited amount of gear. I had an Akai S1000 sampler, a Juno 106 and a Waldorf Micro Q. I just got tons of mileage out of those pieces of gear because there are so many different ways to be creative with them. I’m not knocking software synths at all, but I personally don’t have the ability to be that creative with them. Other people are, but not me.

I don’t consider hardware a luxury because I don’t think these are luxury items. I think people’s priorities have become very skewed.

DFA quite quickly became the focal point for a loosely defined scene. Do you feel like that has an impact on the way you create? Does it give you more freedom, knowing that there’s a loyal following for what you do, or can it feel restrictive in the sense that people have certain expectations of what a DFA record might be?

I definitely feel the opposing effects of those two things. On the one hand, being on DFA is an essential part of my career. My best friends are on the label and we all make music together. We go on tour together, socialise together at home, grow up together over the years. And DFA has become an iconic label – it defined a period of time in dance music and continues on as a viable and relevant source of new music.

However, I do get frustrated by being lazily pigeonholed a lot of the time. I’m especially offended by being referred to as nu-disco. It reminds me of nu-metal. I’ve never thought of my music as being very overtly disco. From the beginning I was much more looking to house and techno influences. As a DJ, I’ve never played disco. I’ve always been a house DJ while most everyone else on the label was playing disco. Shit Robot and I were always the ones that played much harder, in some ways playing sets that directly opposed the prevailing aesthetics of every other DJ on DFA.