Influences – Juan Maclean

Maurice Fulton is one of my favorite producers. He truly has his own sound and he is a character, two things sorely missing in the age of cookie-cutter drag-and-drop-loop Deep House. There are 100’s of video tutorials online now that will show you how to make any sort of track you want, and no shortage of places to download premade loops to make them with. This Maurice Fulton tutorial is either a brilliant piece of performance art, a rare glimpse into the mind of a mad genius, or a ‘fuck you’ to the state of electronic music production.

I first saw the movie The Warriors when I was about around 10 years old and it terrified me. I took it very seriously and it instilled in me a deep fear of New York City. I thought that gangs were running around menacing everyone in site dressed up in baseball uniforms and whatnot, which, in fact, may have not been far from the truth at that time. While in Brooklyn working on ‘A Place Called Space,’ the lead track on my new album, Nick Millhiser put on ‘The Warriors Theme Song’ for a bit of inspiration. I picked up a guitar, we dug up some vintage phasers, and embarked on some epically ridiculous guitar riffing. At the end of the day we were asking ourselves ‘what will James Murphy think of this,’ but then I remembered that James was right there with me producing my first band Six Finger Satellite’s ‘Sea of Tranquility, Parts 1 & 2,’ which features lots of reverse guitar solos and whatnot.

People often ask me how I got the name ‘juan.’ In 2002 I was in the studio with James Murphy working on the b-side to my first 12,” TG-3X, which was very much influenced by Model 500. Juan Atkins was a huge influence for me, ‘No UFO’s’ was the first 12″ I ever bought and it just blew me away, it was what I wanted to be doing. All day James and I were having an ongoing discussion about what to call my new project, and we were blasting TG-3X in the studio control room at maximum volume, which caught the attention of Marcus Lambkin (Shit Robot), who was working down the hall in a smaller studio. Earlier in the day Marcus and I had had a discussion about his trying to quit smoking pot, since drug addiction was my field of expertise. I had told him “look, do you really think you are going to quit forever? You know you’re going to do it again at some point, so why wait?” Apparently he didn’t wait long. He came into the control room giggling and said ‘so who do you think you are, JUAN MacLean?,’ accusing me of ripping off Juan Atkins. At that point James looked at me and said “this will be your name from now on, Juan MacLean. But I’m going to put a ‘The’ in front of it, it’ll make you sound more important.” Every since then everyone has called me Juan, I don’t even answer to my real name anymore.

Along with ‘No UFO’s,’ ‘Your Love’ was a very early influence for me in terms of my production aspirations. When I first got it I would sit in my bedroom listening to it over and over, weeping silently, it was so impassioned and conveyed a deep yearning that fueled my overwrought adolescent emotional state. I realize that Frankie Knuckles probably had nothing to do with the production of this track, but it made me immediately seek him out, and he became a hero of mine. I played with him shortly before he died. He came on immediately after me, and within 2 minutes of his set I felt like an idiot for every thinking I knew anything about DJ’ing. He was a true master and a lovely guy, it can’t be stated enough.

Public Image Limited was a huge influence on my first band, Six Finger Satellite. I remember when I first heard Second Edition. J. Ryan, Six Finger Satellite’s lead singer, and I lived together and he brought it home one day. I listened to it over and over again, taking more and more drugs, trying to get handle on it. I had no real reference point for it, though it featured elements of some of my favorite music, mainly disco and dub. It was one of those albums that I had to work at. It’s its own universe of sound and reference, and over time it began to make sense to me, both musically and in terms of it’s social context during the heyday of punk rock. I quickly went out and bought a Travis Bean guitar. I actually had a Travis Bean Flying V, as featured in this video, and it is one of the great regrets of my life that I sold it during hard times as there were only 50 of them made. Keith Levene is one of my all-time favorite guitarists, and also gave me the idea of playing synthesizers onstage while playing guitar at the same time.

DAF are another mainstay of inspiration that have lasted through my early days as a teenager in Six Finger Satellite to my present day The Juan MacLean productions. Their use of live drums couple with beefy synthesizers and sing-song melodies has been a big influence on me and a lot of DFA stuff in general. It doesn’t take a genius to realize the ‘DAF’ becomes ‘DFA’ simply by rearranging two of the letters. Likewise, Conny Plank’s production has influenced me in the studio more than any other producer, and I know the same to be true for James.

My first two 12″‘s and my first album were all made with an Akai S1000 sampler, a Roland Juno 106, and the first iMac, a red one. Even I get caught up in the gear and technology frenzy that is the world of music production in 2014, and I forget that it really doesn’t matter. No amount of gear or software innovation is going to make you make better music. When I first learning electronic music production in the late 90’s I remember reading an interview with Photek, and he similarly said that he had a sampler and a couple of synths, a very minimal setup, and his productions are astonishing. Brian Emo commented in 1996, in his book ‘A Year With Swollen Appendices,’ that the problem with music production software is that it’s not designed by musicians. A prophetic insight, as it turned out, because all these DAW’s that we are forced to use now are more like video games than serious studio tools. With every ‘improvement’ in the software it seems like we get further away from the soul and emotion of making music.

Moodymann is a fucking legend. He has an uncompromising vision and aesthetic sensibility unlike any other. Aside from his production genius, like Maurice Fulton he is another deeply mysterious character. He doesn’t have a Facebook or Twitter account, he just churns out high quality tracks that always sound like HIM, and he is untouchable in terms of how cool he is. I have no fucking idea what this guy does at home in his spare time or what he thinks about the latest Resident Advisor poll or whatever, which makes him infinitely more interesting than the latest Deep House DJ with a team of publicists and high power management steering the course.

A supreme work of surrealist art. I especially appreciate the satirical religious contempt and the at times weird for the sake of weirdness forays. I’ve never been a fan of David Lynch, and how could I be after seeing The Holy Mountain? Jodorowski has won in the ‘weird’ contest with this one in a way that has never been duplicated.

I first saw Logan’s Run when I was around 10 years old, and like ‘The Warriors’ it had a deep effect on my psyche. I really took this stuff seriously, I was convinced that we were headed toward an immediate future in which turning 30 meant a death sentence imposed by the government to ensure the greater good. The set design of Logan’s Run was a direct influence on the artwork for my second The Juan MacLean album ‘The Future Will Come. ‘