New Track: The Juan Maclean Mess With Time In 'Zone Non Linear'
Tristan Young @talltristan
While one can never expect a prolific release of albums from any artist (unless it’s Ty Segall or King Gizz) you can at least count on the Juan MacLean to always be dropping singles. This week they’ve released a new one called ‘Zone Non Linear’, and points are of course awarded for cool track names. Banging off with an almost pugnacious synth smash, a sequence of slightly moribund waves of disaffected synth churn up and down. Nancy Whang’s iconic vocals display her typically deadpan void of feeling. Her initial delivery is cold and sterilized, an icy hollow where emotions are stored in suspended animation. In a cool trick, it’s her trailing vocal echos that actually exude sentiments like desire and care. It’s as if they spliced in a mirror universe showing Whang’s more theatrical side. Those barriers eventually do come down deeper into the song in terrific fashion, as Whang’s anodyne voice is contrasted with feverish and urgent outbursts of impulse and need. The precise maneuverings along such a narrow and vast vocal spectrum have always been one of Whang’s inexorable and unapproachable talents, and ‘Zone Non Linear’ certainly doesn’t disappoint in this regard. In keeping with the temporal chaos as implied by the track’s name she repeats the inescapably cool line, “I wanna race to the moment when we meet”. Those exclamatory splashes of synth singularities start mixing with sparkling droplets of precipitating notes. The steady erosion of the beat by the inundation of micro notes is forced back by those more monolithic strikes, creating a melody at war with itself. For a group so skilled at creating kinetic slip stream sequences, it’s interesting to hear them experiment with the antithesis of that; with non-linearity. Wherever those ideas eventually take them, Whang remains the control and the constant.