Juan Maclean's real name is John but he changed it to Juan and also added a 'The' so that he became The Juan Maclean which is totally cooler than just John. He's from New York and he was one of the first to release music on DFA; that's because he knew DFA boss James Murphy from a 90's post-grunge band called Six Finger Satellite. In fact the first song on the first DFA compile was the basic electro sinewave By The Time I Get to Venus, the title alone a play on musicological history. So in many ways Juan created the template for the majestic DFA sound. Apart from, that is, James Murphy's own DJing as Death From Above around about the year 2000 when he would play Krautrock to club kids. Juan's just done his second album The Future Will Come. He's the new Gary Numan, the sad robot. Juan told the Village Voice that the cult in modern life of being "above average" and the quest to be in the "99th percentile" was deep and entrenched would stay -- yet somehow the idea of being automatic or from a factory which you'd think would go down quite well if you want to be better/faster/stronger than everyone else would be was something that didn't compute. I heard Who Made Who as well, from Denmark. They're the same. Sad, sad robots drinking cognac on tragic, lonely planes and wanting to be punished. It's odd, all this. Kraftwerk never said robots should be sad.
Here's four from Juan.
These first two are from The Future Will Come.
This one's a brand new remix of Montreal band Duchess Says
Lots more synthy nu-wave biz on this Canadian blog here.
And this is from 2003, from the second DFA compile.
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