Jacques Greene

Lauren Martin

Hey there. The man next to me, is from Montréal, was born and raised here, and has a very international outlook on his music, his work, his art. We’re going to get really into that, about the loving pedantics of that, how to live and work as a musician right now. Please help me welcome Jacques Greene.

Jacques Greene

Hey guys, welcome to Montréal. It’s really incredible to see such a crazy thing happen in my city. It’s really a beautiful thing, are you guys having a good time?

Audience Member

Yeah.

Jacques Greene

Great.

Lauren Martin

Good to get a yeah in there early.

Jacques Greene

Yeah, trying to get you guys on my side.

Lauren Martin

We are on your side, don’t worry, it’s cool. You’re born and raised in Montréal, tell me a little bit about the city and its music?

Jacques Greene

Yeah, I’m from the east side, born and raised in Mile End and raised in Outremont. This is an interesting place where... I’m French Canadian, and it gives us this weird Astérix and Obélix-like outsider, within the world perspective. We always have this... we’re North American, but not really. Some of us like to pretend like we’re European. It’s an interesting thing, where I think at every stage of everything I’ve been into, there’s been a proclivity towards more outsider art, more outsider electronic music, more outsider rock music. I think from Godspeed You! Black Emperor, or even Arcade Fire, who became a huge band from here, when they started was still something very much outside of what The Strokes sounded like, or whatever the main rock music was. Yeah, I think it’s a great place, but it brings in this DIY, slightly rebellious, or idiosyncratic approach to creation and life. There’s a lot of weirdos here. It’s a nice, weird place.

Lauren Martin

What would’ve been idiosyncratic in rebelling against? How would you describe Montréal in the era of something like a Godspeed coming up? How does the city function at that time, and what would be the rebellious thing to do?

Jacques Greene

There’s this innate mistrust of this corporate America. Whether or not it’s even founded in reality, there’s always been this, "we’re apart, we’re French Canadian, the English are trying to take us over. They’re trying to take away our language." We have all these very strong, powerful laws to maintain French here. It creates this atmosphere of slight animosity, but mostly a punk attitude, and this idea of: we matter, we need to make our own stuff. There’s always been very strong pride in scenes that are built around these very unique senses of identity, and crews, and defining our own worlds. Were any of you at this Turbo Crunk party we did last Saturday?

That was like this bizarre world that we made for ourselves with Lunice, who’s also from here, and Seb [Diamond], who’s working for the Academy, and a few other people. Even though so many of the cultural touch points were from elsewhere in the world, which I think is this very modern way of existing, there was this idea that it could only really happen here. From this idea of: we’re outside of electronic music, and being not only Canadian, but in French Canada, we’re definitely outside of rap music. Our entry points into that are so distant, and so flimsy, that they end up existing in this way. Also, there is no real mainstream electronic press and stuff here, all we know about are these DIY show spaces that various Godspeed members are affiliated with, people are performing at, and loft spaces. Then the music ends up taking this scrappy, DIY space.

Lauren Martin

You grew up in the neighborhood where Godspeed You! Black Emperor are based, correct?

Jacques Greene

Yeah, that’s right. In fact, their studio, called Hotel2Tango, is named after the area code, which is H2T, and that’s very much, it’s like this ten block radius, called the Mile End. Yeah, it’s this industrial looking place, it feels a little like Greenpoint in Brooklyn, and it’s a magical place. Now, it’s got a lot of brunch spots, and furniture stores (laughs), the same way Greenpoint is going, but there’s still a lot of its spirit that’s still alive. It’s a unique, beautiful place.

Lauren Martin

Tell me about the intersection between DIY bands, like Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and the electronic music parties. How does that work? Often, the two main sets are quite different, how did it converge?

Jacques Greene

They aren’t that different, and my first studio outside of my house was shared with Wolf Parade, which is a big indie rock band from here, that some of you might be familiar with. They use a lot of synthesizers very subtly in their music, but they had a lot of synths around. I learned how to use synthesizers from members of rock bands.

Then your friends who were in a DIY rock band, that couldn’t afford a drummer, had an Electribe, a little drum machine. A lot of scrappy... there was this exchange of musical sensibility, that ended up carrying over to the music I make, which we’ll get to pretty soon, is very synth driven, but I would just let the tape run, and play with the filter the whole time. There’s really this performative, growing aspect to the music. It’s less sequenced, it’s less clean cut, there’s always this moving, scrappy nature, that you would also find in the indie rock of the city, I think.

Lauren Martin

Is it almost like playing a synthesizer, with the mindset of somebody who would be a guitarist?

Jacques Greene

That’s exactly right, where I think there’s this beautiful thing, I was listening to this Chilly Gonzales podcast the other day, where he was singing the praises of Daft Punk. He was talking about how revolutionary it was that they were building hooks, not around musical ideas, or even musical notes. The way they were playing the filter was becoming the hook, and I played a lot of guitar, and I was pretty good at it, but I’m awful on a keyboard. I’ll punch in my notes with a mouse and stuff, but then there comes this moment where you become so intimate with your filter, your envelope, and that becomes the instrument, that becomes the emotion.

There’s this kinship between techno and blues. Not just cultural. They’re both black, American music. I think it’s very easy to forget that about techno. Then also, if you listen to a lot of Underground Resistance, or acid house, we’re talking about essentially, eight bar blues, with someone riffing on top, except that instead of a little guitar solo, or these simple refrains, it’s an acid line, or whatever it is. Then that live aspect, or connection with live performance, when we’re all terrible at playing instruments, or we just don’t have access to recording them properly. Yeah, you end up expressing yourself, or expressing that musical performance aspect in a different way, I guess.

Lauren Martin

Why don’t we listen to something of yours? Why don’t we play something quite early on? We can do a lineage of this.

Jacques Greene

Sure.

Lauren Martin

You’re like, “Oh no, god.” What should we do? Why don’t we jump out of Montréal, and go to the UK?

Jacques Greene

Yeah, sure.

Lauren Martin

Talking about this originalism, and internationality, this is a record that you brought on a British label called Night Slugs, correct?

Jacques Greene

You’re going there. Yeah, this is one of the first songs I ever released under this moniker. Night Slugs are a huge, beautiful collective of kids out of South London, that pioneered what we now disastrously refer to as bass music. It had roots in UK funky and grime, and a lot of these London sounds, and I ended up on there.

Lauren Martin

Yeah, and we can get into that. This is called “(Baby I Don’t Know) What You Want.”

Jacques Greene

It’s got some chipmunk vocals in it, sorry about that.

(music: Jacques Greene – “(Baby I Don’t Know) What You Want” / applause)

Jacques Greene

Chipmunk vocals did not age that well.

Lauren Martin

Well, we have PC Music now, so.

Jacques Greene

Yeah. I’ve passed the baton.

Lauren Martin

OK. I remember you saying something a while ago, and it made me think of your relationship with possibly regionalized, hyper-specific genres within electronic music, and you said, and I’m going to do this right, “It would be so embarrassing today if there was a huge movement of people making the same style of music.” Why would it be embarrassing?

Jacques Greene

I think there’s kind of a fallacy there. I can be a little cynical at times, but, at the end of the day, I get pretty utopian and hopeful about how democratic information is in the Internet age. I think that’s... as I’ve mentioned before, for a French Canadian kid growing up in Montréal and my immediate access to culture being somewhat limited, having like LimeWire and Kazaa and, then, kind of discovering everything that was out there, and, then, Soulseek, and you would find a computer out there with someone that had a folder, and, all of a sudden, like you’re... This age of discovery and going into Wikipedia wormholes.

More than ever, there’s a possibility to find what truly defines you and what you’re actually about. Because there’s this infinite possibility of combinations of things that trigger creativity or wonder or curiosity in you, it would seem kind of weird if you were exactly like someone else, like if you end up being like “Oh, yeah. I use that exact same sample pack, and I make all my songs at the same BPM.” I find that to be kind of a weird thing nowadays.

If you grew up in the late ’70s or early ’80s, in a small town, and then you found a Cure record or something, I get that you would, then, just be like “Oh, that’s how I dress.” Before, you would have these kind of... music and fashion are related in a level that is impossible, because they all come at this part of your life where you want to assert yourself and your identity, and I understand wanting to be part of something bigger, but it seems so odd nowadays that you would still see someone in a uniform that’s associated to a genre or making music that fits perfectly into this box. I find it exciting that most of us don’t.

I definitely do feel like nowadays there’s this effervescence of weird variety and subgenres that, the moment a journalist tries to name them, they’re just kind of embarrassing themselves with a word that’s not going to age well. (laughs) I think that’s a great thing. My music sits within dance music, within club culture. I’ll play you guys some other stuff. There is kind of a general classification there, but I’d like to think that, actually, everything I’ve done is kind of to create my own world and my own niche.

I have my own set of rules or whatever, not even consciously, but I ended up creating this thing where I make music every day, or try to, anyways, and most of it doesn’t fit Jacques Greene. A lot of it, I either won’t press record on, or sits on my hard drive as fun stuff. I find that to be therapeutic and, also, a really nice way to explore stuff. Then, sometimes, something comes along, and it’s like “Oh, OK. This is starting to shape towards a record that will fit into this world that I’ve created,” but it’s not so much like, “It will fit into this Beatport genre section.” It’s really within my own narrative and continuum of what I’m doing.

Lauren Martin

What was something that came along that gave you a ground rule for the Jacques Greene project?

Jacques Greene

After throwing this Turbo Crunk party, I started getting way more into just straightforward dance music, and I got really obsessed with some early vocal driven house music, where, what I was talking about before of this kind of idea of like blues and dance music... I really love the early house that kind of chops up disco records and, then, reinterprets them into these tight, nimble dance floor weapons, and I love the vocal in the club. I like going to cold electronic music sometimes, but, at the end of the day, I really like the warmth.

I think, in this world of all of us kind of existing online and we like to talk about all of these detached times, there’s really something to be said for music that makes me feel connected to others and kind of has that. House music that had the vocal chops really brought that, but these were made by people in the early ’90s who kind of grew up on disco, and I ended up growing up on, like, Aaliyah. For me, it was kind of like making vocal sample driven dance music, but from my own reference points.

We’ve got a Masters At Work song here that I want to play just a little bit of. Masters At Work are really, really good older New York house music guys who made music that was simultaneously tough but also melodic and had this spirit of disco.

Lauren Martin

OK. This is the track that you would have referenced for one of your own.

Jacques Greene

Yeah. Or that kind of spawned the genesis of the idea, for sure.

Lauren Martin

Cool.

Jacques Greene

Yeah, here.

(music: St. Etienne – “Only Love Can Break Your Heart (Masters at Work Dub)” / applause)

Lauren Martin

What’s the name of that track?

Jacques Greene

“Only Love Can Break Your Heart.” It’s a Masters At Work remix of St. Etienne. I think like, even from this one to the one before, the one before was something I made six, seven years ago, so very raw and young, but, also, it speaks to kind of the scrappy sound design I was talking about of being from here and not really knowing how to use a synthesizer very well. There’s the same idea of breaking down some vocals to their core elements and reaching for this minimalism but still keeping the humanity and the warmth of a vocal record. I think that was the main thing, I just got obsessed with that, and, ever since, it’s been... Yeah.

Lauren Martin

You’re basically responsible for all those R&B vocal edit club jams that happened?

Jacques Greene

I’m not like... Partly.

Lauren Martin

Partly?

Jacques Greene

Partly. (laughs)

Lauren Martin

Tell me about why...

Jacques Greene

I’m so sorry.

Lauren Martin

Why would you want and hone in on a Masters of Work record when you were raised on people like Aaliyah? What can you tell us about working with tracks like that and building the vocals into your own? That’s something that’s a thread through all your work.

Jacques Greene

I’ve always been more comfortable within the realm of club music. I definitely believe in something. If you don’t think you’re going to be the best at what you do, you should let others do it. I’ve done a couple R&B records, or worked with some people and tried to do it, but I didn’t want to make traditional R&B. That was just kind of like a part of what I was into. I was really big into electronic music. Sorry, lost my train of thought there. (laughs) I really want to do something new, I want to push things forward. It’s the same reason I wouldn’t use a disco vocal and I really try to use a vocal that’s a little more contemporary. I sometimes tend to work with a lot of hardware synthesizers, but I’ve tried to pry myself away from using too much of the old classics, and the old Roland gear. There’s definitely a thread in dance music of pure ’80s. If you make real techno, you have to use gear from the ’80s. At the end of the day, techno means technology. These guys were using ground-breaking boxes back then, and I want to make music for today.

Recently, I started trying to use more strange, digital sources and samples. Either a weird ambient sound on YouTube, or I’d record a synth line and upload it to YouTube in a bad quality and rip it from there. That comes from really loving Dilla and RZA and their sampling, like scratchy vinyl. But that’s their generation. I don’t go crate-digging. I go digging on YouTube. That digital noise of a file, that makes sense to me. I was raised on Napster, bad bit rate mp3s, and something that felt truer to my experience and truer to my work.

Lauren Martin

Is there something that we could play of yours that illustrates how you use a vocal sample in this kind of scratchy way?

Jacques Greene

I actually brought this interesting one, a song I released recently called “You Can’t Deny.” Started as sitting around my apartment when I was living in New York with my roommate and a friend of mine, Joseph, and we were talking about how Twitter timelines are mostly trash and we were just watching people trying to sell us stuff. One of them pipes up and goes, “You need to be following more strippers.” I was like, “Wow, that’s ... Okay. Fire away. Give me a name.” He gives me this name of this adult entertainer person on Twitter that was really outspoken. I start scrolling through her timeline, and find a SoundCloud link. It’s her singing into her Android phone, uploaded straight to the SoundCloud app. It’s a great vocal take.

(music: Jacques Greene – “You Can’t Deny” / applause)

Lauren Martin

Thank you.

Jacques Greene

Inspiration is everywhere, guys. (laughs)

Lauren Martin

Tell me about using the Internet as a resource for music. Not, like you say, you’re not a crate-digger. It would be insincere... You feel it would be insincere for you to call yourself a crate-digger, and do a Madlib, as it were, and go to a record shop in Sao Paolo and find all these funk records and turn it into an album. You don’t do that.

Jacques Greene

More power to the people who do that, that’s a beautiful thing, but it’s not me. It feels insincere. The Internet is the ultimate resource. I knew guitars, so I knew a bit of music, but it was... I found out about Warp Records when I was a kid, and I was like, “Wait. I need to get into that.” I had no idea. I didn’t know what a sampler was, I didn’t know anything. Then you go online and next thing you know, you have dubiously acquired copy of a DAW, and you can start reading about synthesizers. Coming out of college, I had a day job and I was doing this music on nights and weekends. I never slept. All I did was make music outside of work. I spent every penny of every paycheck on synthesizers and samplers and stuff. Towards the end of that job, all day I was just on these message boards. Not even with an account, but any question I had, all day, I was just like, “What is side-chaining? How does that work?” I taught myself modular synthesis without having a modular synthesizer just by finding...

Lauren Martin

How does that work?

Jacques Greene

There’s a website that I still use today called Modular Grid, where you can plan your systems and make sure you don’t blow up your boxes. There’s a message board run by this modular synth shop in California called Muff Wiggler that’s full of older guys posting pictures of their systems with their cats posing in them. Literally. Then there’s also... every question you’ve ever thought that you might want to ask has been asked in a seven-page thread somewhere on the Internet. That’s such a beautiful, cool thing. Still today, I’ll end up hitting a roadblock in Ableton, or some MIDI routing. I recently got into [500 Series] lunchboxes, because I didn’t have enough ways to spend money in the studio.

You guys know the 500 Series? Like post-processors, and compressors, and stuff? That gets so dense. Once you’re in there, there are people who kind of assume that you know everything about studios, but still I’m on this website called gearslutz, and then I’m reading reviews on, should I get in the 3-band or the 4-band API EQ? There’s guys who have done the AB tests with uploaded WAV files of everything. It’s such a beautiful thing. Whether you’re looking for a sound, a sample, knowledge, people to make music with, people to book you for shows, ways to play music for people, it’s really... It’s great.

Lauren Martin

The vocal that you recorded from that adult entertainer. Did you ever talk to her? What’s the sense of responsibility with this sort of thing? If you take someone’s voice from the Internet, and use it in one of your tracks, you’re teasing out a context of another person’s life, and you’re making it your own. You have... Do you have a responsibility to get in touch with that person? How does that work?

Jacques Greene

Well, we’re getting in touch and all that, but in an ideal world, I’m a bit of a total Internet liberal. I like the anarchy of it all. I’ve come across so many people that have made bootleg remixes of my stuff, or even uploaded my music on their own YouTube channel. Sure. I think that comes with the luxury of... Maybe this goes to all of us in this room. We started making music after people bought it. I released this song that did pretty well a few years ago called “Another Girl,” and an older friend of mine who was a DJ in the ’90s and stuff was like, “Man, if you released that like, eight years earlier, you would have sold like 60,000 copies of that 12".” The flipside of that is, it’s sitting on 3,500,000 streams on Spotify. Arguably, more people have heard it than if it was a cult 12" in the ’90s, so you kind of split the difference on the... Don’t do this for money. Don’t do this for money. There’s money out there, and that’s a great thing, but I think there’s a beauty to the fact that we’re in this post-structured economy in music, and you have to come to it from a different viewpoint. Unless you guys are trying to become The Chainsmokers, in which case, go for it. I wish I could just steal all over the place, and people could just steal from me, and I’d be totally fine with that, but yeah there is a responsibility to try and clear stuff and be cool with the people you work with.

Lauren Martin

Where does your structure and your money come from? You were an art director for a few years, because we’ve had conversations this week about how to make art and how to live, and how the two relate, so tell us about your working life and the intersections of that with your music.

Jacques Greene

From back when I had a job? I went to CEGEP, which is kind of a form of college here, and I studied graphic design. I was already making a lot of music, but this kind of comes from coming up after people are buying records. I never thought... To me, it was always going to be a weekend or evening thing. I had this job, and then I wasn’t saving any money because I bought an MS-20 and stuff like that, and I felt really cool, but then this one record I was talking about actually became in-demand enough, and I was using all my vacation time and weekends to go play shows, and... I don’t know. I kind of looked at my dad, and was very proud that I could pay my own way through life, but I was like, “I can’t decide to do this at 32. It’s happening for me right now at 21.” I’m just going to go do this. I’m going to go play Berghain, man.”

It’s been okay since, but the revenue streams are definitely more live. I have to travel a lot, which is a great thing. I don’t think I would have been the kind of person to go to South Korea if it wasn’t for my job, so it’s a beautiful... I’m so humbled and thankful for that all the time.

Lauren Martin

Tell me about having a touring life as a musician, and how necessary it is, because like you’re saying, if you have a track that has 3,500,000 million streams on Spotify, does that pay for your food? What pays for your food and your rent and your life? That gives you a level of comfort that you can continue to make music?

Jacques Greene

It has to be the shows. The Spotify streams are something that come around and it’s like, “Oh, wow, cool! This was an unexpected royalty statement,” but I think music has gone through this interesting transformation where my recorded output is almost more this flyer for the touring, and I think before, people would tour a bunch in order to get some money and make a record, and then kind of freeze a moment in time, and now it seems like it’s a lot more this kind of constant putting out music to advertise the shows. It’s this inversion of... Not of importance, because both are massively important. If I come to your town and play a show and it’s terrible, it doesn’t matter that one of the songs is good and you like it. It’s still a bad show, but yeah. It’s insane.

I didn’t really see that coming, and coming from a bedroom-producer angle, which, even band people are now that; most people I know who make guitar music and singing music, more than ever, I think, are writing all the music themselves, and at home, and all this stuff, and it’s created a funny thing, where I think the archetype of like, the Mötley Crüe rock guy has kind of given way to introverts who torrent, and we have to be in a club with 5,000 people even though we weren’t invited to house parties in high school.

Lauren Martin:

That got a random laugh for sure. Tell me about how you build a live show. That is a big, loaded, and probably expansive question, but how do you do it? How does somebody in this room go from having some music and some recorded output, and building a show that is the advert for what they do as an artist?

Jacques Greene

Well, up to now I’ve been predominantly DJing, and I’ll try to... DJing when you’re predominantly an artist is really kind of an exciting way to have a conversation with the people who come to your shows. It’s a way for me to... For instance, that Masters At Work song I played before, that might find its way in there, and it kind of subliminally provides context for what I’m doing. I’ll play a lot of influences, and then these days I actually try to play a lot of my own stuff, and mostly stuff from friends of mine, or people I’ve had personal relationship with, so a lot of Machinedrum tracks will end up in there, and Evian Christ. People that I legitimately get along with in my life, and that I want to assemble as this kind of context, as a kind of thread. Now, I started releasing a lot of records again and all this stuff, and I’m doing a first live show in a long time tomorrow, and I’ve been preparing that all week.

I don’t think... The sky’s the limit. Now that we have computers or a USB stick that can play a full song, I don’t think you should feel limited or... It’s kind of a choose-your-own-adventure thing, and you can really go all-out, because even a lot of the more extravagant productions of the ’90s, like a Chemical Brothers set, was really just a data disc playing the whole set and the guys standing behind the walls of synthesizers, so it’s for you. It’s what you want to do. I find being onstage a little awkward, like right now, especially when my own music is playing, like right now, and if I do it in a club and I’m playing my own music for an hour and a half... when I’m DJing, and I’m just letting my own song play, I actually kind of feel very uncomfortable sometimes.

This came from a conversation I had with Sam, Floating Points, who is one of the best DJs in the world, but also one of the best producers ever, and I booked him for a party of mine like 4 or 5 years ago, and he didn’t play any of his own music; it was all just rare disco and stuff like that, and it was fantastic, but I couldn’t help but be like, “Man, why didn’t you play one of these recent great records?” And he said that, “When I DJ, I’m trying to present my favorite songs, and the best songs I can, to the audience, and I feel like I’m kind of full of myself if I’m choosing my own over these great records,” which was a great thought, and now makes me feel like this conceited jerk every time I play my own music (laughs), but all that to say, there is some truth to that.

If I’m just kind of sitting there and my own song is playing, it’s a little stressful, so I have a bit of an elaborate live show; I’m bringing in a modular synthesizer into the club and sequencing some drum machines live, and it’s kind of a way to not get to that frozen state of anxiety, so I’m busy enough that I’m not actually thinking that there’s like, 500 people listening, being subjected to my songs for like, an hour.

Lauren Martin

I think we’d like to play the first video, please. This is a live performance for electronic music that you found particularly influential, and we can watch that. Sounds a little bit funny, but it’s the visual audio component of it, and we can talk about that. Can we get the first video, please?

(video: Plastikman Live)

Jacques Greene

That was a live Plastikman show. He brought... Richie Hawtin was a very early techno guy from Canada; brought his early kind of minimal acid project back a few years ago, and I thought that was really inspiring because in techno there’s this quest for, “Oh, it’s just a white label with a stamp, and I wear my unusual hoodie,” and DJ with no lights on. That’s really cool, but there’s this idea that once you’re on stage, you are making a choice. You’re presenting yourself a certain way. Did anyone here read David Byrne’s How Music Works? This book published a couple of years ago. He gets into this idea of the moment you’re on stage, it’s like kabuki theater. It’s performance. No matter, if you choose not to do anything, that’s your choice. If no one can see you and you’re playing behind your screen, that’s choosing not to be available. That’s part of your performance. I always thought that was really interesting and really stuck with me. I was very impressed to see Richie, who’s usually part of this austere, techno world kind of go all out with the screen. But then, what you miss there, he’s actually there with all this equipment, all the studio, but it’s not really so much about this kind of masturbatory, “Look at how big this stuff is and expensive my equipment is,” because you can’t actually really see it. There’s this side of self indulgence that he’s just got it there for himself, that I really appreciate.

Playing live is such a great way to expand the vision of what you’re doing. There’s this kid on Monday night at Divan Orange who was playing guitar and had these amazing dance moves. I’m trying to see if he’s here. I’m not sure. Is he around? Anyways, it was so sick. It was like this beautiful moment of I felt like I was entering the slipstream of being in the waveform of the song. I’m in the universe. For the time that he’s onstage, I’m locked into his world. I think that that’s such a beautiful thing. When you went to see Prince and he started playing “Purple Rain,” the lights weren’t orange, they weren’t red. They were purple. I like that it affords you all these extra choices and details that you can make where you actually take people with you somewhere. I ended up... so I was studying graphic design. I worked in advertisement, stuff like that. At the end of the day, a lot of my passion in the world is communicating with people.

When I was a kid, throwing parties and playing the music that I really liked at people, that was kind of my way of... I’m saying, there’s a difference between DJing at people and djing with people. Definitely when you’re young and bashful you’re playing at people. There was still this desire to communicate and establish a link with people. I think in this Internet world, these spaces of the clubs and live venues and live shows are beautiful opportunities to create spaces that everyone can kind of live together in. You watch 30 seconds of a Plastikman video and you’re like, “This is Plastikman’s house.” You’re all there for one thing and you’re all there going through the same experience. I think that’s like a great moment.

Lauren Martin

You mentioned the David Byrne book, How Music Works. He had that very kabuki theater thing when he did the Stop Making Sense tour and that was designed to have no kind of stage presence whatsoever. What do you find, apart from the people, there wasn’t...

Jacques Greene

That kind of ended up being one of the most iconic stage presences ever. That’s kind of what I’m saying.

Lauren Martin

Yeah, because it was so minimal.

Jacques Greene

Yeah.

Lauren Martin

What is the appeal of something as audiovisual, technically bombastic as something like a Richie Hawtin and what David Byrne would have been doing with the Stop Making Sense tour? Where is the lineage of that, for your interests?

Jacques Greene

I definitely think that even with the bombast of the Plastikman thing, we’re still looking at one screen, with kind of one color almost throughout. There is something to be said about, throughout everything that is kind of getting better, I think we’re speaking to like a minimalism. People in the Victorian age, I don’t buy that. You look like an idiot. People have got all this frilly, random stuff. We’ve gone down to t-shirts and jeans. Over time, modern architecture is like this kind of function over form kind of beautiful thing, the same way techno and house distilled blues and disco.

Minimalism just means that the fewer elements that you have, but they’re right. The best dishes you’ll have in your life are probably quite simple but just have the best ingredients possible. I don’t actually think the Plastikman live show is all that different from the Stop Making Sense. David Byrne ends up bringing a house lamp on stage. That’s an insanely deliberate, and kind of bombastic choice, because there’s no reason it belongs in the room. It’s just a single light. I think that’s all you need, in the same way that you need a drum track, a sample and a synthesizer and you’re ready to go.

Lauren Martin

What gets you ready to go for a live show then? Talk to us about the process of putting one together, perhaps the most recent one that we’re going to see this weekend.

Jacques Greene

Yeah. Again, with the idea that a live space is a beautiful way to bring people into your world, it’s been really fun to dig through a lot of my songs and a lot of the things people are familiar with and kind of open up the projects again and see how I can play with them a little, play around with them but also maybe reinterpret them. I’m not playing that first song you played of mine, but if I did, I probably would have either removed the chipmunk vocal or done the drums differently. It’s kind of interesting to revisit your work and present it in a new way. Are you guys familiar with The Knife, that big group from Europe? They started as this synth pop group, and by the time they released Silent Shout this really acclaimed record that was kind of stark, like minimal rave synth and one drum machine, they were still performing “Heartbeats,” that song from the first record, but it grew into this completely other lens, like this kind of gritty reboot of that song.

I think the live show affords you to finally, your work that was finished, opens up again. There’s a way to interact with your work again in a way that a filmmaker never gets to do. That’s a really cool opportunity. I don’t know if I fully agree with Kanye [West] releasing an album that ended up changing a bunch after the release date. I like the idea of recorded albums being finally finished, maybe for our own sanity I think. We’ve all gotten lost in working on something. MIDI means that you can change everything forever, and that’s really awful. I think a big reason why I started using hardware synthesizers is you press record and it’s done. It’s in. The idea’s finished. You can kind of treat it afterwards, but your main idea, you have to stick with it.

For my own sanity, I like calling something finished. But then there’s... with time, with distance, with growing past this work that is nice when it kind of is a snapshot of your life at that time, being able to re-contextualize, or revisit it and be like, “No, I actually see it more as this thing now.” It can be the most minor of details, but it’s a beautiful opportunity. Preparing for this live show, it’s kind of sitting with all this stuff and be like, “What do I like about these songs? What do I not like? What do I want to put forward? Or whatever.”

Lauren Martin

We’re talking about Richie Hawtin. That was an expensive endeavor essentially. That would have taken a lot of time and energy and money, which is what most musicians do not have. Talk to me about new technologies, very accessible technologies, and how somebody could use that in a performative setting, especially when you think of in the context that iPhone’s 10 years old. You know what I mean?

Jacques Greene

That’s insane, yeah.

Lauren Martin

Anything about that would be great.

Jacques Greene

You can use your iPhone as a MIDI controller. Yeah, there’s massively cheap ways of controlling rigs that make it look almost like that. Tomorrow we’re using DMX, where I can take MIDI sequences out of my computer and have them control lights. Essentially, the same sequences that are controlling a melody that’s going to my synthesizer or that triggers a clap can actually go play the lights. Then you can start playing the lights as musical instruments. This is something that we’ve done extremely cheaply though Max MSP. And it can be done through your Ableton, or even if you don’t have Ableton, you’re using an MPC. You can actually... That’s amazing. That kind of speaks to this idea that a live show is so much more than what’s coming out of the speakers. It’s the people that are around you, it’s the lights, it’s the price of the drinks, it’s how you’re feeling that night. There’s all these kind of incalculable things that come together and create a moment.

Being in control of as many of those things as possible is amazing and you can do it so on the cheap now, if you get kind of creative. Even before having this thing, I had a friend of mine that you know call Jason Voltaire, who’s also from here. He came with me and he would just kind of do live projections using software that’s readily available. Then using MIDI instruments that you would think were for music. He was familiar with all my music, so he knew how to, like, he was almost like playing visuals. That’s cheap. You rent a projector and you get a screen.

Lauren Martin

Did you make a jacket for a live show once?

Jacques Greene

Yeah.

Lauren Martin

Can you tell us about that?

Jacques Greene

Yeah, I was asked to program an evening of multimedia stuff at the Tate Modern in London. In everything I do, I try to work with Montréal creatives if I can, and there’s a very talented avant-garde fashion designer from around here called Rad Hourani who was not only the first Canadian to become haute couture, but the first unisex haute couture line. A really, really talented person, and I’d written a runway show score for him, so we decided to work on something together, and he made me this kind of custom jacket that was outfitted with four or six cameras the size of like, your iPhone camera lens, and we broadcast it on these three giant screens, and it kind of played with this idea of everyone looking at the performer, but this idea that the whole space that you’re in is actually all part of the show and all part of your experience.

The cameras were capturing in real time, either my hands on the gear or the audience themselves, and the walls, and that was a really interesting and fun moment of fashion/video/music/experiential... Yeah. It was awesome.

Lauren Martin

What is the fine line between music and marketing it? You can have really boring music and a really fun-to-look-at live show. How does the relationship change?

Jacques Greene

That’s a complicated one. It’s one that... You will find yourself wrestling with that at some point. Man, you know, all those things are pushing in different directions at the same time, and if you don’t watch out, if you get lazy and you let someone else that you’re working with carry the load, you can end up making boring music and being carried by the other parts. You know that fine line is so blurry, and it’s subjective. It sits differently for different people. As I was working on this live show, I was playing a show in Beirut for more traditional, underground dance music guys, and the next day we’re having lunch and I’m telling them how excited I am that there’s going to be this interactive play between the music that I’m performing in the lights, and it’s all going to happen at the same time, and for me, it’s this very exciting way to communicate my music, and he goes like, “Aw, man you think you need lights?”

He saw it as this kind of like, inherently being less about the music, and we just really didn’t see eye-to-eye. It’s really funny, because one of the earliest shows I went to when I was a kid was Marilyn Manson, and that blew my mind, man. The keyboard player; his keyboard’s on a swing! Marilyn Manson comes out on stilts! That’s so sick! In a way, that ends up making the Antichrist Superstar what it is. That’s what makes the song... Is that because the song is boring? I don’t think so. I think that’s because music is theatre; theatre is music, music is fashion, it’s all the same thing. I think if you cut it off at one point, then you’re depriving yourself of a full 360 version of what it could be. Even Mad Mike from UR wears a bandanna, and that’s sick.

Lauren Martin

Have you become your own Antichrist Superstar? How do you feel you’re getting on with it?

Jacques Greene

I really... That’s amazing. Not yet. I’m still the little worm for those that remember that album. (laughs)

Lauren Martin

The one Marilyn Manson fan in the house.

Jacques Greene

Nice. I’m working on it all of the time, and even when I get to my Antichrist Superstar, it’ll be time to go towards my Mechanical Animals. In the sense that the artistic process, even though certain works are done, I would hope that the overall narrative never is. I recently finished this larger body of work that totally felt like the closing of a chapter of a lot of the music that I made over the last six years, and parts of me are kind of like, a little scared that some people would react to it in a strange way, because it is vocal chops over club music, and if you’re that hip, and spend that much time at Corsica Studios, you’ll hate it, but for me, it’s like when I go see the Matisse cut-outs, I want to see how many of them he did and how he made his way through that practice, until he was done and went on to the next medium, and I think, for me, that chapter is kind of closing, and I’m refining it with this live show, and I want to present in a certain way, but then even before that material is fully out, I’m starting to think of, “OK, what is this Mechanical Animals? What is this next step? How do I push my craft forward? Where do I go from there?”

Lauren Martin

Can you think of an example of how you formulated a live show, or some kind of graphic for it, and it went horribly wrong, and what you did to fix it?

Jacques Greene

I can say, technically, my very first live show abroad was at fabric and a couple of other people, and Ango was playing with me at the time, a friend of mine who lived here, and we had the modular onstage and an MPC. There was no laptop or anything like that, and we didn’t convert the power properly, and halfway through the second song, the MIDI was tracking exponentially instead of linear, and so an octave, instead of going like “do-re-mi,” would go like [singing] you know? We were two songs in, we’re playing this remix of Radiohead that I did, and Andrew is just playing chords as I’m restarting an MPC and unplugging a MIDI cable, and he’s looping it for so long, and I’ve got this other drum machine, and I start programming a snare roll, and it was like the most epic buildup of all time.

People are starting to go apeshit, because they’re like, “Holy shit, this next part is going to be crazy,” and then I restarted the MPC, and I unmute this MIDI file to the Doepfer and he’s like, “We got audio? We got audio?” And then it’s completely the wrong note. I look at him and I go like, “Let’s go!” And we just kind of launch into the next section, and it became like this atonal, crazier version. (laughs) It made the rest of the show a disaster, because you can’t just go full atonal on every single song, but in that moment, that was pretty crazy. Visuals and the rest-wise, I think we’ve been pretty lucky.

Lauren Martin

It’s interesting to talk about mistakes, because what people see when they go see...

Jacques Greene

It’s pretty exciting.

Lauren Martin

When you go see a performance, you see the end result of a long period of work, and people can appreciate it as a flat effect. They don’t see the timeline. They don’t see the mistakes; they don’t see the work, so I think it’s so interesting. I think it’s almost more fruitful to talk about the work and the mistakes than it is to talk about the success.

Jacques Greene

You want mistakes! When I was a kid going to rock shows, if you came up and just played me your latest album perfect, note-for-note, like, I could have done that at home, dude. Come on, that’s ridiculous. I think bands like Radiohead have always done a very good job of blindsiding you with just a slight tweak, a new section, or another take, or having a second drummer onstage that has these other fills, or what I was saying, when the Knife re-interpreted the songs from the first album so they just sounded like this completely other vibe. That’s exciting, but within that, mistakes can happen. There’s always an element of chance in my shows. That comes from... Our Turbo Crunk party was, it was a running joke that at some point a synth would just break down, and Rob, our ringleader, would just get on the mic and just kind of be like... “You know, it’s Turbo Crunk!” Just not even really make excuses for it. I think there’s a beauty to that. If it’s just going to be perfect, and everything’s going to be exactly like the recorded output, we can just stay at home.

Lauren Martin

Should we play something of yours that is going to be part of your live show, and we could maybe talk about how you interpret a track in a visual way?

Jacques Greene

Yeah, sure. Interpret a track in a... I don’t know. I wish the visual guys were here to go over that. You want to play the other new record that came out?

Lauren Martin

Should we play “Afterglow?”

Jacques Greene

Yes, go for it.

(music: Jacques Greene – “Afterglow” / applause)

Jacques Greene

So, for starters, that song’s going to be different because half the synths in it don’t have presets. I can’t save presets on half of my instruments. I literally have to make them on the spot. That alone means that there’s going to be an element of chance or an element of variety, which to me is very exciting. That’s actually... Part of that will be... On the spot, there’s definitely going to be moments where I’m like, “Oh, I wish I got closer to the one on the record.” But there might be other moments where I’m like, “Oh, man, this fits in the mix so much cooler. This changes the whole ambiance going on here.” I’m excited for that. I’m always super excited.

Lauren Martin

Tell me about how the live shows in that regard, then, can influence your studio process, because if you’re going back and forth from performing, and writing, and finishing tracks, there’s such a symbiotic relationship now that one must inform the other, right.

Jacques Greene

In fact, I probably end up playing songs to people, mostly in DJ sets, hundreds of times before they’re actually out, which is really exciting. I try not to let it inform too much. I think that’s how guys end up making big room dance music, is because they start playing bigger clubs, and they’re playing their older material, and it’s not big enough, so they start getting bigger drops and all this stuff. There is this thing, like I’ll finish the song, sometimes in a hotel room, put it on a USB stick, play it that night, and be like, “Oh, wow, that one kind of went over really well.” Or, “Ooh, the low end is really muddy.”

With a live show, it’s definitely become a symbiotic relationship where... You guys are all working at these beautiful studios upstairs that are full of all this equipment, and I don’t want to sit here and go through the analog versus digital conversation, because I don’t, I mean, I’ve played you guys a SoundCloud phone recording that made it into a song, that’s now available on vinyl. Love that. (laughs) But, my experience with music is extremely tactile, and I think it needs to be if you’re making club music. This is the corniest thing, but at some point, while I’m working on this music, I need to be standing up and moving and letting that track go through me. If it doesn’t work on me, it’s not going to work on anyone else. If I can’t sit with it for eight hours, there’s no way anyone would want to sit through it for four minutes.

I find that it’s a little hard to really get into it standing up, clicking down on my laptop. Doing that stuff is a little difficult. Whereas, if the physical nature of equipment, being literally kind of a little far apart, so I have to move around, that physical space ends up dictating, also, even some minor changes in the work, because I can’t actually change a filter at the same time as the sequencing on the drum. There is a literal hand limit to the changes that can happen in the song at the same time, and I think that ends up driving the sequencing or the writing process.

Lauren Martin

OK. You’ve bought so many machines over the years, do you still feel like you’re refining your own guitar techniques on the synth? Do you still feel that mindset?

Jacques Greene

Yeah, completely. I think I’m not so much a hoarder with equipment, and I, nowadays, I’d like to pare it down to one set-up. I think part of what I’m saying with thinking about my project moving forward is, I think I had this set-up that kind of dictated how I sounded, because I carefully picked the equipment that I had in my room. We all write a certain way. I know you were talking to Dev Hynes the other day. When a Dev Hynes song comes on, you just know it’s him, because of the sounds that he’ll gravitate towards, or the chord structures that he’ll gravitate towards, and I’m very much the same way. It’s like this prison that you can’t escape out of. What naturally sounds good.

I want to, maybe, overhaul myself a little bit, but then, there’s other stuff, like my modular synthesizer has become this extension of... I just know exactly how to get certain things out of it all the time, and... Don’t do it. It’s like this money pit. And then you fill it up, and then you’re like, “Oh, maybe I should buy another box and start filling that one up.” Next thing you know, a wall in your apartment’s just got all these cables coming out of it. It’s terrible.

Lauren Martin

If you don’t want people in the room that make music to buy a modular synth, then what can they do?

Jacques Greene

By all means, do it, but then you’ll... Yeah.

I would say, spend more time with fewer things. I think I encounter a lot of friends who buy a lot of equipment all the time, and never get comfortable with them enough. I think there is this thing of, like what we were talking about, kind of, guitar. All this stuff ends up becoming your voice. If you want to be all over the place, and be this kind of chameleon, that’s cool. I think I’ve always responded to, or respected more, producers that still had an unmistakable voice. When you put on a Rolling Stones record, you know who it is because Keith Richards has a certain way of playing, and Mick Jagger comes in a certain way. But when you put on a Modeselektor record, it sounds like Modeselektor. There’s no one else who could make a record like that. Or when Burial releases a new record, it’s three seconds in, and you’re like, “Oh, yeah, that’s him.”

There’s such a beauty to that, and it’s actually kind of hard to do with the unlimited options and the thousands of presets per thing, and the millions of sample packs out there. Even if it’s just software, I think sticking to a few tools, you’re like, “Oh, I can fully express myself just this way.” And then, hopefully, making your own banks of presets. Having your own pocket of sounds. I think is such a worthwhile thing to do, because then, even if someone doesn’t like your music that... No one will ever make music that everyone in the world loves, apart from Prince. You’ll always be able to stand on your own two feet. You’ll always be able to have that dignity and self-respect of, “Yeah, but I made this. This is mine. This is my fingerprint. This is what I do.” I think that’s so important, and that speaks to all forms of art. That’s the difference between someone who will end up having a retrospective at the MoMA, and the people slinging landscape paintings down the street.

Lauren Martin

I think that’s actually a really nice note for it to end on, so, Jacques Greene, thank you very much.

(applause)

Jacques Greene

Thanks guys.

Lauren Martin

Does anyone have any questions for Jacques Greene?

Audience Member

Hi. You were talking about music in the Internet age, and I was thinking about music consumption in the Internet age, and since everyone goes to the Internet to listen to a lot of music, but there’s also a lot of power that is there in Internet browsers and stuff these days. I feel that it’s being under utilized. You see certain groups, like Fractal Fantasy, for example, making really good use of how music can be consumed on the Internet, without using traditional means like music videos and stuff. I was wondering if you think about stuff like that, and have anything to?

Jacques Greene

Yeah, completely. A few years ago I did a song with a friend of mine, How to Dress Well. We just had it live as a website where you could move boxes of little clips that we’d shot around. I think... it’s endless. What you want to do is... I definitely think that living outside of those traditional streams means... there’s a lot to be done there. There’s still a lot of possibility. Now that we all have computers in our pockets, I think we’re going to see a lot of use of that. Yeah.

Those traditional ways are great though. I’m a big fan of YouTube just having the largest collection of music ever. It’s insane. I’m listening to someone’s new song, then the recommended tab, like 35 minutes later you’re worlds away. That’s very cool, too. Having your own standalone thing is really cool and it can make an impact. Again, that kind of speaks to the universe building factor. I would always recommend, always having your stuff on YouTube or the SoundClouds or whatever for that interconnectedness.

Audience Member

I feel like traditional media’s not good. I love YouTube and that is great you know. I was just.. besides YouTube as well. You can have YouTube, and you can have...

Jacques Greene

Yeah. Of course. There’s a lot of new kind of labels. PC Music was a huge maverick in that, like creating micro-sites for every song. These worlds and little pages with animation and stuff. That’s awesome. That’s beautiful. You’re creating so much more than just a record sleeve. That’s really cool.

Audience Member

Thank you.

Lauren Martin

On that idea, what do you think about ... If you’re listening to something on YouTube and then something comes up in the recommended bar, if you are an Arca fan, say, and you’re listening to an Arca record, and the recommended track after Arca is a Rihanna record. That means that Rihanna fans are going to get exposed to Arca videos and music, in the same way that Arca fans are getting exposed to Rihanna. Does that create like, a flattening effect for audiences? Some people will take the poptimist view, that that’s a really great thing. Rihanna fans will hear your music, that’s cool, but you might get Arca fans that are like, “I don’t want Rihanna fans listening to my music.” Where’s the sense of control for audiences for stuff like that?

Jacques Greene

It’s gone. Unless you create vinyl only records and that’s your prerogative. I think that is absolutely gone. I think you don’t get to choose who else is in my iTunes with your record. I think that’s actually, I find that really conceited. There’s an exclusivity there. I’m definitely more of the poptimist view, because my records have pop all over them. They’re oozing with R&B and stuff like that. A lot of my production was actually driven by Timbaland and Pharrell Williams when I was a kid. I’m definitely on that side of being excited that the Rihanna fan might stumble on an Arca record, and vice versa. If a kid lives in his bubble of only listening to Triangle and Mute records, and ends up letting his YouTube play and being like, “Oh, wow, this Rihanna song’s actually cool.” Sure.

Because Arca ended up working on Kanye West. There’s interesting names and incredible talent going behind the scenes in pop records all the time. Our mutual favorite, The-Dream, and Tricky Stewart has his own kind of underground, cult R&B status, but he’s also written “Baby” for Justin Bieber. There’s weird crossover everywhere. I think that’s a good thing. I’m of the utopian view that I want everyone to intermingle and work together.

Lauren Martin

There’s also the idea that Steve Jobs didn’t make the iPhone, a lot of people made the iPhone. Those kind of music cultures bred other things together and it happens through things like, finding each other on YouTube.

Jacques Greene

Completely. The thing is, Arca’s music wouldn’t exist without the pop music that also informed Rihanna. At the end of the day, I’ve seen Alejandro DJ, the kid loves Rihanna. I know that he’s happy about Rihanna being in the recommended tab. Culture gets so much more complicated than people want it to be. There’s this desire to have, oh, this is us, and that’s them, and we have our scene and that’s that scene. It’s so much more complicated than that. We all come from these intermingled cultural touch points now, that splitting hairs and having this, not classist, but, I don’t know...

Lauren Martin

There is a classism in it.

Jacques Greene

Yeah. I find that kind of shitty. It’s kind of an ugly sentiment. It’s one that we had in high school, of like, “No, we’re into underground music, those are the normies.” It’s kind of insane that people would feel that way, later on, to me.

Lauren Martin

Any other questions? I’ve not heard the word the normies, like in a long time. Normies.

Audience Member

Norms, even. I just wondered, so you said you’ve moved back to Montréal recently?

Jacques Greene

I’m in Toronto, now.

Audience Member

How do you feel about where you make your music and how much do you think that, in this age of connectivity, the actual, physical location matters. I know with touring you’re traveling a lot, but more on a day to day level, why have you lived in the places that you’ve lived, and what do you think are the disadvantages versus the advantages? Or just the general feeling that you’ve come across with that in your creativity?

Jacques Greene

I think that’s a really important question. Living here was huge for me being able to make music, because the rent is absurdly cheap here. It’s really cheap, and there’s a lot of other artists, and there’s a lot of venues. Putting that together, means we have more time to make music, more people to make music with and more people to play music with and play music to. Whereas, before living in Toronto I was in New York for two and a half years, and though I was able to mingle with a lot of artist communities out there, all of us were so busy touring in order to afford our rents that I would see most of my New York friends at festivals in Europe more so than in our neighborhood. None of us could really afford studio space. It was really fun, but it actually kind of stifled creative time by the very socio-economic nature of the city. I think now in Toronto I’ve found a middle ground between that.

I would say that now, with this kind of Internet age, all you need is that and proximity to an airport, and you’re ready to go. I started making music and I could afford a synthesizer and I could afford this stuff because my rent was $700. Then I put it on Myspace, and flew to where those scenes were and those people were and where the money was. I think this idea that you need to be in one of these centers is a little outdated. For the best, because now it means we have scenes coming out of... I’m following this rapper called DJ Lucas, and his group Dark World. They’re from farms in west Massachusetts. I went to one of his shows in Toronto. He was touring with Wiki from Ratking. We had a conversation about it, and he was like, “Literally, I live with six of my friends in this gigantic farmhouse, and we just make music all day.” Because they just don’t have to worry about rent. There’s a lot of creatives around them.

He’s lucky, because he found other people to make music with. I would say if you’re in a small town and everyone sucks and they’re listening to Pitbull, you need to get out. (laughs) I think it’s less so about being in the hot spot and more so about finding a place for you that’s conducive for you to create.

Audience Member

Thanks.

Jacques Greene

Is that...?

Audience Member

Oh, absolutely. I mean, it’s a pretty open-ended discussion, I really appreciate your opinion.

Lauren Martin

Anyone else?

Jacques Greene

Oh shit.

Lauren Martin

You know this guy, right?

Jacques Greene

Yeah.

Audience Member

Hey. First off, I noticed you remixed a little ditty by Frank Ocean.

Jacques Greene

Yeah.

Audience Member

I just wanted to ask a really important question. Endless or Blonde, and why?

Jacques Greene

Why not both? I got so obsessed with Blonde, but after three weeks of it solid? Then going to Endless for five, six days, was like, “Oh, yeah this too.” I think in the same way, the way that everything else I’m telling you, you don’t have to choose, because it’s all there. They’re perfect companions.

Audience Member

But if you had to choose. Like...

Jacques Greene

I’m going to go Blonde, I’m going to go Blonde.

Audience Member

Thank you.

Lauren Martin

What is it about... You said that you remixed a Frank Ocean record. R&B’s been a long love of yours. How do you feel about the movement of contemporary R&B and somebody like a Frank Ocean, like you say, feels very much that that was recorded in a bedroom.

Jacques Greene

I feel great about it. It’s definitely a product of the bubble kind of burst on this overblown, big R&B in the pop stuff of like the TLCs and the 112s of the late ‘90s and early 2000s. I think maybe that’s a healthy thing. We got back to an R&B that was more rooted in Marvin Gaye and stuff like that. D’Angelo being back. I think that’s great. Harder to play in the club. Kelly Rowland “Motivation?” That was a good time, but that was a time and a place. I think it’s kind of a good place. A lot of R&B is a little more on the edges now. There’s definitely ...

I have a little bone to pick with some of the lyrics of modern R&B. I really like, in the ‘90s and before, it was about, “I want to make love to you.” Now, R&B lyrics are like, “I’m going to fuck your girlfriend.” Which is, like, the loss of romance in the Chris Browns and stuff, is a little...

Lauren Martin

We don’t say his name ‘round these parts.

Jacques Greene

I’m a little bummed on the loss of sensuality and a lot of this like, Weeknd driven misogyny.

(applause)

Lauren Martin

Anyone else? No? We good? Oh, OK, yeah, sure.

Audience Member

Hey.

Jacques Greene

Hey.

Audience Member

Last Saturday, when I saw you at Turbo Crunk, so you were DJing... I’m more familiar, I’ve always been a fan of some of the work you’ve done with Koreless, and actually those collaborations I find really beautiful.

Jacques Greene

Thank you.

Audience Member

They resonate a lot with the kind of music I listen to a lot. When I saw you on Saturday...

Jacques Greene

Shocked!

Audience Member

No, seriously, I was like, “This is Jacques Greene? I thought he was downtempo, chilled out, you know?”

Jacques Greene

Tomorrow will be that.

Audience Member

I know, yeah. Obviously from what I’ve heard from you today, it’s obvious you’re diverse in everything you do, and that’s actually how I am as well. I do like downtempo music, but I can get really energetic, rabbity, Energizer Bunny kind of thing. Anyway, I was just wondering how do you feel about that, when you perform, or you DJ, right? You’re technically marketing your music. In a sense? Right? Because if I didn’t know you, and I saw you play, I’d be like, “Oh, he’s like some hardcore, future bass music.” You know?

Jacques Greene

Yeah.

Audience Member

I wouldn’t expect to then go look for... if I was just into ambient, downtempo music, I wouldn’t be like, “Oh, let me search for other kind of stuff you’re doing.” How do you feel about that?

Jacques Greene

That was a contentious point, strictly for that night. I made music as Hovatron when we threw that party. Which is a dumb relic of a name of the same vein as anything containing crunk in the name. That was very much informed of having all these synths around and being obsessed with rap music. There are a few Hovatron R&B mixes out there. I’ve softened up in my old age. A lot of that DJ set was a lot of the music we would have played at that party like seven years ago or so. Yeah, I’m sure some people who were there were like, “Oh my goodness.” Hopefully no one decided to never open one of my records again.

The same happens even when I DJ as Jacques Greene, though, because people are booking me at 1 AM and I’m definitely playing the slightly heavier stuff in my catalog and playing dance music. If you’re into my stuff with Koreless, sometimes I’ll manage to slip that in and I’m really happy about it. Oftentimes, no. I know that I’ve had kids will come up to me after the show, and they’re like, “Man, your early music got me through a breakup in 2011.” I’m like, “Wow, and now you’re at the club at like 2:45 listening to techno. Must be quite a weird one.” I’d like to think that even when I’m playing dance music, Saturday excepted, I do try to communicate the same kind of warmth and the emotion and the stuff. Even if maybe the drums are a little tougher, my ear naturally gravitates towards records that kind of sit slightly closer to what I make.

But yeah, you’re totally right. Maybe I’m misrepresenting myself at times. In the same way, Floating Points was like, not playing his own music when I booked him. It ended up just being part of the Floating Points world.

Audience Member

Just to clarify, it was a great set.

Jacques Greene

(laughs) Thanks man.

Audience Member

Hey man.

Jacques Greene

Hey.

Audience Member

Could you describe how you make a song from sort of start to finish? From the inception, without giving away too much at all. You can be as vague as you want.

Jacques Greene

I think I’ve tried to put sticks in my spokes and break the process up as much as possible, so I wouldn’t repeat myself. This comes from like, not really saving any drum kits and, like I said, having a lot of equipment that I can’t save or don’t know how to save pre-sets on. I like the idea of starting from either one melodic idea in my head, or in the case of what I was playing before, which happens a lot, is finding one sample. Finding one two second thing in a song, and I’m like, “Oh my God.” Then I just kind of repeat it, ad nauseam. Then will usually play chords around it. Harmonically, make something kind of around it. Then shape the sounds from there. I’m very much kind of a building up from a bare bones guy.

Then that traditional producer thing of going through 56 snares. Like (makes snare noises). Just kind of cycling through the drum kits and being like, “Oh this one kind of sits right. It compliments everything else that’s going on.” Then building kits from there. Usually, from the melody though, then the drums come later. There’s been cases where, it was more of a drum thing. More of like a rock way of writing. Where the basic beat is carrying and I’m kind of noodling around and find some notes that work.

Audience Member

Amazing.

Lauren Martin

Round two?

Jacques Greene

Breaking up the habits, I think is a handy thing. I know you guys went through the Brian Eno lateral thinking cards? Or I forget what they’re called. Breaking up your process and approaching problems from different ways is a great way of not repeating yourself.

Audience Member

Hi again. I was wondering how the Night Slugs connection came about?

Jacques Greene

I sent them a bunch of early music to play on their Rinse [FM] show. Then I made this other one and I just sent it to Bok Bok to play. Just thinking that he would play it. Then a few months later, he was like, “Man, I’ve been playing this every show. I love this. Are there release plans for it?” I’m like, “No.” That was it. It was through SoundCloud messages. Yeah.

Audience Member

Thank you.

Lauren Martin

Great. Well, thank you very much Jacques Greene.

Jacques Greene

Thanks guys.

(applause)