Influences: The Juan Maclean

Chrome are definitely in my top 5 influences of all time. Their two best albums, ‘Alien Soundtracks’ and ‘Half Machine Lip Moves,’ sound like a mixture of Kraftwerk, Jimi Hendrix, Can, and Black Sabbath. I think their formula of combing electronics with live instrumentation left a deep imprint on me in my teenage years.

My first (and only, aside from The Juan MacLean) band, Six Finger Satellite, was massively influenced by Kraftwerk, so we started buying up synthesizers in the early 90’s. At the time they were quite inexpensive, my first was a Moog Rogue that I bought for $50 at a pawn shop. The Rogue had a basic trigger function and we’d try to play along to minimal sequences but were baffled by more complex functions that groups like DAF were doing. I thought they were playing it all by hand and became discouraged. It’s Steve Albini who told me about sequencers, and about DAF actually. So I bought a used Prophet 600, which featured an onboard sequencer, for a whopping $75, hoping to sounds like DAF. I still have it.

Metal Box/Second Edition is probably my favorite album of all time, and certainly the most listened to. During my drug taking years, I spent an inordinate amount of time nodding off to this record, It’s just a part of me at this point. Combining Disco influences with nihilism and dub, PIL were far, far ahead of their time. Keith Levine, the bands guitarists, played a Travis Bean guitar and Prophet 600 synthesizer, and I quickly acquired both. Last year I posted something on Facebook about him being my all-time favorite guitarist, and how as a youngster I had copied his setup, and he chimed in something like ‘well done.’

This is the first 12” I ever bought, sometime in the 90’s. I had read in a magazine that there were these guys in Detroit making a new technology driven kind of electronic music that was concerned with the future and influenced by stuff like Kraftwerk and European Synthpop, which sounded right up my alley. I immediately became obsessed, it’s what made me want to produce electronic music.

Tim Goldsworthy turned me on to this sometime around 2000. I couldn’t figure out if it was House or Techno, which upset me at the time, I wanted to get the genres right. The intro to ‘Happy House,’ before the piano kicks in has a plinky piano part with delay that was very much inspired by the lead bit in this track, I was always trying to recreate that sound.

In the early days of DFA, or technically the couple of years before DFA officially formed and we were a small group of people hanging out in the studio obsessing over music, surprisingly Basic Channel was a massive influence. Again I think it was Tim Goldsworthy who turned me on to them. I had never heard anything like it, they sounded otherworldly and deep in a way that no one else could touch. This record, I’m guessing, is their attempt at doing a Chicago House track. This is another record I was obsessed with for years, and despite the terrible sounding pressing, I would play it in every DJ set. Deep atonal yet melodic sounds with plaintive vocals, it’s a sort of blueprint that has influenced me immensely.

Morgan Geist is a good friend of mine, we live a few blocks away from each other so we can go out to lunch a lot. He’ll get upset at me for saying this, but in the early days of DFA Metro Area was a huge influence. Definitely the most interesting thing coming out of NYC at the time, during the Electroclash years. The production on these records was the best, they still sound amazing and unique, timeless stuff.