review and photos by Philip LaRose

Last Monday night when I went to Nectar Lounge to see The Juan MacLean and The Field, I didn’t know that I’d be at the hottest show in town. These two groups played sizzling sets of electronica to a packed and enthusiastic crowd. DJ Nordic Soul warmed up the club with a solid mix of dance music.

The Field is the stage name of musician and producer Alex Willner, who builds his music out of samples and loops and synthesizers. He has ties to minimalist and ambient electronica, as his music features long repetitions of rhythms that are added, changed, and dropped slowly over the course of the piece. However, these rhythmic patterns play out over a quick dance beat, making the music vibrant rather than languid. For this tour he enhanced the live aspect of the music by sharing the parts with a couple musicians, one who alternated between bass and drums, and another who mainly played additional synth but also played some guitar and glockenspiel. (A fourth person spent all his time a little off to the side at a laptop, and I couldn’t tell whether he was contributing to the music as well or mixing the accompanying video projections.) Having these additional musicians helped forge a strong connection with the audience, who could see when a featured part, such as the bells or the drums, was being played and thus could relate the musicians to the music—a relationship often lost in the button-pushing knob-twisting realm of deep electronica. And the audience responded to this connection with great enthusiasm, cheering loudly and bouncing a lot. The Field’s music is very cool stuff, and I could easily listen for a few hours; it seems tailor-made for airplane flights, and I’ll have to pick up the aptly-named album From Here We Go Sublime before my next trip.

While The Field kept the club simmering for an hour, The Juan MacLean brought it up to a full boil with their high-energy synth rock. John MacLean and Nancy Whang shared vocals, synths, and miscellaneous percussion, backed by Nicholas Milhiser on additional keys and percussion and John Fuchs on a mixed electronic and acoustic drum set. MacLean also had a theremin hooked up to his synth, and sometimes he just let it color the synth sound, but sometimes he totally rocked out on the theremin directly, which was amazing to see and hear. Although MacLean’s theremin skills were the most obvious sign of rocking out, followed closely by Fuchs’ motion-blurred drumming, all of the musicians contributed to the electrifying performance. Despite the predominant role of synths in the band, the music had a very warm and vital sound that had the whole club hopping. They built up to a stunning conclusion with “Happy House”, extended to over 20 minutes and climaxing several times, and then cooled things down in the encore with the mellow and dreamy “Tonight”. Both songs and much of the set came from their latest album The Future Will Come, which I also need to add to my collection. This was a great show and I’d love to see both bands again soon.

Every Monday through Friday, we deliver a different song as part our Song of the Day podcast subscription. This podcast features exclusive KEXP in-studio performances, unreleased songs, and recordings from independent artists that our DJs think you should hear. Today’s featured selection, chosen by Midday Show host Cheryl Waters, is “One Day” by The Juan MacLean from their 2009 album, The Future Will Come, available on DFA.

It’s an interesting relationship that spawned DFA’s new act The Juan MacLean: lead singer John MacLean started his musical career in Rhode Island band Six Fingered Satellite. DFA head and LCD Soundsystem frontman James Murphy joined the band late in its existence as a sound engineer. Eventually, though, the members of Six Fingered Satellite went their separate ways. MacLean got a degree in sound engineering and Murphy moved to New York, but their friendship continued. After Murphy started his label, DFA, and his own band, LCD Soundsystem, he urged MacLean to step back into the music spotlight as well. Thus The Juan MacLean was born. However, the process wasn’t so easy. The Future Will Come is only his second album since his 2005 debut, Less Than Human, as he spent the last four years performing live with a band, including LCD Soundsystem keyboardist/vocalist Nancy Whang, and DJ’ed whenever he could. Ultimately, though, he claims The Future Will Come is the best album he’s ever worked on. When you listen to “One Day,” you’ll get a taste of the DFA dance-punk aesthetic lingering on the edges the song, a sort of up-tempo push that’ll get your feet moving. At its core though, the song is a more traditional bit of electronica, a pulsing low-key bit of dance music you might find blasting from the speakers of a dance club.

If you didn’t catch The Juan MacLean when they were at Nectar in Seattle last week, you really missed out! They’re wrapping up their North American tour this week — Webster Hall this Saturday for all you New Yorkers — before they head over to Europe for a bit. Follow their tour blog on their MySpace page and hold your breath ’til they come back again. For now, here’s the video for today’s Song of the Day:

Why not get an early jump on Record Store Day (it happens this Saturday!) and head over to your favorite records store today? There are a lot of excellent new releases hitting shelves this week to make you want to get an early jump, including the long awaited sophomore release from Silversun Pickups and an even longer awaited new album from Metric. Plus, you’ll find the latest from The Boy Least Likely To, John Doe & The Sadies, Papercuts, The Juan Maclean, The Handsome Family, Pomegranates, and Wooden Shjips. Promising debuts arrive from Ida Maria, who was recently live on KEXP during the Morning Show, NYC’s Suckers, and Grand Duchy, a project by Frank Black with his wife, Violet Clark. Robert Pollard fans need only wait a month for each new release, it seems, and this week brings the seventh release from Circus Devils. Check out the rest on Largehearted Boy’s list.

Local label Light in the Attic is is reissuing Monk Time by the garage/psych/punk band The Monks, along with a collection of unreleased collection of their early demos called The Monks: The Early Years 1964 - 1965.

If you’d like to win a copy of Monk Time and a poster, write me before 3PM on Wednesday, April 15. One winner will be selected at random.