House Is A Feeling

So last night I went to see the Juan Maclean as part of the Ether Festival in the Royal Festival Hall. It was a pretty strange place and time to see some of the acts but the Juan Maclean, playing tracks from their new record, were excellent. It reminded me how much I like older tracks like “You Can’t Have It Both Ways” (video of it above from an older gig), which still sounds great. For me that is one of the great records of that strange interzone of time in which dance music became so aligned with Rock and EBM and Italo that the current return to American soundswould have seemed completely implausible.

I also should add that despite not being a diehard DFA fan for a few years, anytime I’ve seen any of their acts play I’m always impressed by their vision of live dance music, to the extent that it almost feels like the best reason for the label’s existence is to provide this version of disco and house and techno that is filtered through the band format. Maybe that’s obvious to anyone who’s been paying more attention than I have!

After the Juan Maclean I managed to see a bit of Chateau Flight performing a soundtrack for the Parisian silent movie “Les Vampires” in the auditorium. I’d never heard the music for this, even though the project is a few years old, but it was a great sound to hear in the cinema-type setting, similar to Ame’s “Fiore” from a few years back. It didn’t seem to tell me much about the movie but it was worth seeing. I believe some people (eg newspapers or BBC4) refer to such events as “art”. I wouldn’t know though as my thoughts begin and end with appreciation of physical tasks/objects and “hard graft”.

Later on DJ T and Thomas Schumacher attempted to DJ to a rapidly emptying foyer with about 30 people in it, many of whom appeared to be employees of the Royal Festival Hall. It was the sort of gig where you feel sorry for the performer, the sort of gig anyone who DJs has probably done at some point. Though having said that, a friend pointed out there were two of them available to keep each other company and they were probably earning a four figure fee.

I spoke to T briefly, having hung out with him years ago when he played the Pod in Dublin, and chatted a little about Get Physical. Funny that despite the lack of talk about the imprint he told me it’s still the third biggest seller on Beatport. I haven’t been thrilled by their music in a long time, apart from the odd remix here and there, but I guess it’s a sound with mainstream appeal.

The whole thing ended at 00.00 or so by which point nobody was really left, but the Juan Maclean were fantastic and they are the reason I decided to do this post. Their album is released tomorrow and you can watch a nice video of one of the singles here.