Let Jacques Greene Teach You How to DJ

In Theory is a semi-regular column in which Andy Cush takes a close look at the compositional underpinnings of songs new and old in search of a deeper understanding of how and why they move us.

The first time I interviewed Jacques Greene, about a decade ago, we got to talking about Retro/Grade’s “Moda,” a track from 2009 that had a reputation as something of a secret weapon among DJs. At 10 minutes long, it renders the noirish sonics of Italo disco at the epic scale of progressive house, with an amazingly funky synth riff and a breakdown that, heard in the wrong context, might seem preposterous. 

The Montreal producer-DJ born Philippe Aubin-Dionne cued the song up and talked about what made it tick. He pointed out that the riff is nine beats long instead of the eight that you’d expect, and the rest of the track is in regular old 4/4, an effect that tickles your brain even if you don’t hear it consciously, the music sliding in and out of alignment with itself as it builds and repeats. Then we got to the breakdown, a section inaugurated by “the biggest clap you’ve ever heard,” as Greene put it. The whole track clears away, leaving just a single repeated note, and builds itself back piece by piece over the course of two whole drumless minutes before the groove finally hits again. 

I asked him: If you were playing this out, you’d skip this part, right? Can you really leave people hanging that long without a beat to dance to? He corrected me: the extra-long breakdown was the whole point. “You have to play it toward the end of the night, and you’ve got to make sure everyone is on your side,” he said. “And then this creates probably the biggest moment of the night, every time I’ve ever played it.”

This exchange has always stuck in my head as a rare interview moment that genuinely taught me something. About boldness: how a musician’s choice to actively disrupt their audience’s enjoyment of what they’re doing can help to create an even more powerful feeling of uplift later on. And about context: how a decision that might fall flat in one scenario could turn you into a hero on a different night, in a different club, or even just an hour later. Greene is a great talker and thinker about his art form, with a fan’s infectious enthusiasm, a scholar’s sense of history, an expert practitioner’s knowledge of inner workings, and a natural way of articulating the ways that all sides of that dialectic work together. When he announced his new album jg, which dropped via LuckyMe last week, I knew I wanted to talk to him for this column, which aims to bring a similar insider-outsider perspective to music of all kinds, from avant-rock to classic disco. 

Greene has led a dual career since breaking out in 2011 with “Another Girl,” a softly glowing two-stepper built on a series of disembodied R&B samples that gets a steady stream of “still listening to this classic with tears in my eyes” type YouTube comments 15 years later. (Or, if you prefer, since making his onscreen debut as the swaggy white guy in Azealia Banks’ “212” video around the same time.) On one hand, he’s a hardworking and in-demand club DJ whose recent itinerary had him in L.A. one weekend and Shanghai the next. On the other, he’s a devoted album artist, whose full-lengths—from 2017’s near-perfect Feel Infinite to last year’s Nosaj Thing collaboration Verses GT—form a halo just outside the limits of the sort of straight-up dancefloor fare he would play in his sets. 

jg is the first Jacques Greene album that’s not just about the club, in the nebulous, dreamy way of his earlier releases, but actually for it. Tracks like “What You Say” still carry the old nostalgic warmth, but they yoke it to the biggest beats of his production career. It’s the first album, he says, whose tracks he can drop straight into a DJ set without making a club edit first. I haven’t had the pleasure of hearing it in a club yet, but I have listened a lot while running—the next best thing, perhaps—and I can confirm that I’m consistently logging faster 5k times with it in the earbuds than without. 

I was curious to hear from him about the differences between the two approaches to producing, both on a conceptual level and a granular one. Our conversation includes a fair amount of the latter, but presented in a way that I hope remains inviting to those who haven’t spent time in the Ableton trenches. We talked a lot about frequency ranges: the way that music for home listening often emphasizes the middle—the wide range where a guitar or a voice might sit—and club music tends to live in the extremes on either end (the deep bass of a kick drum you feel in your body; the trebly prickle of a shuffling hi-hat that gets your limbs moving). We also talked about the art of DJing, feeling a room and reacting to it; how you know when to keep things moving and when “we can all stay in this moment a little longer together.”

Your previous albums as a producer draw from club aesthetics, but are really aimed more at the listener at home. This album is full of tracks that you envision DJs playing in their sets. What different considerations are in your mind when you’re producing for each setting? 

Jacques Greene: There are some things that are obvious on the level of the mix. In the past, I would make sure that my record had a lot more prominent midrange. A lot of my prerogative in the mixing was to send the drums to the back of the mix, actually. To have them have a lot of character, for sure, but to really have the melodies drive the record. Almost like an alternative rock record, where the lead guitar is the main thing. Even Jimmy Chamberlain in the Smashing Pumpkins, his drum parts are really powerful and interesting, but they’re way behind James Iha and Billy Corgan. But on a club record, that kick drum has gotta pop. 

And then there’s stuff about the structures of the songs themselves, like letting some parts ride out a little longer, or having other parts change a little faster. I was trying to analyze the way that I play on my Rinse show, for instance, and a lot of the newer club music that I gravitate toward—like some of the umru stuff, or Cloudcore, a lot of the UK underground electronic stuff. And there’s a distinct ADD side to a lot of that music. Sixteen or 32 bars of an idea, then let’s move on. Without ever fully making prog house or trance, a lot of my stuff, like “Another Girl,” has this almost prog-house approach to just luxuriating in a moment and getting lost in it. This one is more like, here’s a fun idea, here’s a rush of adrenaline—OK, you’re used to it? Cool, next part. And that’s really reflective of how I started DJing. Some of the first club music that I loved was the crazier stuff, like Night Slugs, or the way Hudson Mohawke or Jackmaster would DJ. It was this exciting, sugar-rush way to treat the club.

I’ve had a lot of moments in my music where the creative impulse for the song was: here’s what it feels like to think about when a song really hits when you’re on ecstasy. It’s like the memory of that really euphoric track. Whereas, building breakdowns and intros and drops, things that are really for the DJ, is functionally a little different. They’re less impressionistic. And they allow the DJ to create the moment themselves. I was following those impulses in the studio—thinking about that functionality in a more streamlined, direct way. 

For a listener who is not in the club all the time, it might not always be clear that your past records aren’t really club records. The familiar kick drum pulse is usually there, but like you said, there’s more emphasis on the midrangey melodic stuff. What is it about that music that doesn’t really work in the club setting?

The physicality of the low end is just truly it. I got this record mixed by Pearson Sound, David Kennedy, who I think is one of the best technicians of the physicality of a club system. And he really comes from the school of what you would call a smile curve: It’s a lot of super low end, and a really bright, present high end, and scooping out the mids. 

But what’s kind of funny about all this, with the indie sleaze moment happening right now: mids are back, baby. If you go back to Justice and Sebastian and those guys, that was the most rebellious thing about that movement. What dance music was, in 2005, was extremely clean, technical stuff: minimal techno, prog house. And they were just, like, no. We’re coming in at 800 Hz. But it sounds good in a rock club, which is where that music was first played: by 20-year-olds in rock clubs. And the new indie sleaze stuff is being played in clubs with shitty soundsystems in New York. It makes sense. 

But when you’re at Fabric or Public Records or someplace like that, there’s nothing like the physicality of the low end. And unfortunately, that’s why the system’s gotta be loud, and you gotta bring earplugs. I wouldn’t say it’s a political act, but the physicality of the sound is a radical act against atomization, and the powers that be who want us to stay home and watch Netflix. Some people have a little bit of a subwoofer at home. But there really is nothing like a Danley at 105 decibels, with a bunch of 18-inch cones, and the strobes hitting at the same time. There is something about the inherent physicality and the demand for physical space of that kind of music that feels particularly potent and interesting to me. 

Is the imaginary DJ who might be playing these tracks part of your creative process? Are you thinking about being in the booth as you produce? 

The DJ I’m thinking about is often myself. One of the funnest parts about making a club album is that you can go road-test it like a standup comic before the special, in a way that you can’t as much with other styles of music. And the tracks all evolved through that process. This part’s not long enough, or this snare is too loud. Even picking the singles from this record, I’d go to the label, like, I’ve been playing this one for people who have no idea what it is, and it’s a good reaction every time. That’s really thrilling.

I don’t want to sound like I think I’m a super-empath, but I am extremely sensitive to other people’s energy. I will feel extremely anxious if I feel that I’m making someone uncomfortable with a bad joke, or cutting a line at an airport. I want to make sure that people are having a good time. And I think that predisposition helps in a DJ booth. 

I was thinking about this while doing my version of DJing at the Hearing Things anniversary party the other night, which is just playing records. Even if it’s not in an environment for dancing, there are moments when I can just tell something is creating an atmosphere that people are responding to. 

You feel people’s energy, dude. 

How does that feeling figure into your sets? 

It’s such an interesting thing to talk about, because it’s something I so intrinsically feel. And I think it’s a very good argument to not DJ too inebriated. Cocaine in the DJ booth sucks so bad. Avoid it at all costs. It’s terrible, because it blocks your empathy receptors. It doesn’t work. Two tequila sodas, to lose a little of the self-consciousness, to make you a little more daring—there’s an argument for that. But to block off too much of your capacity to feel a room is wild. 

And like you said, I could be in a date bar kind of spot, just playing some records, and I can feel it. I don’t know if it’s micro-movements, or what. I’m not so much of an aura, spirituality guy, but sometimes it does feel like it’s the energy emanating off of people. You just feel people tense up. Or vice versa, you play another thing and realize, the room is better right now than it would be if I wasn’t here. You could just be playing Ryuichi Sakamoto. It doesn’t have to be Carl Craig to 800 people. No matter the setting, you can feel if you’re doing a good or a bad job. 

Are there particular moments on this album that you can remember being shaped by those experiences of playing the tracks out? 

“Presence,” in particular, was made with a couple of different rooms in mind. Stuff like Lights Down Low and the Under the 6th Street Bridge outdoor party, these L.A. parties that I ended up playing quite a few times in the last few years. And that’s one of the most midrangey tracks on the album. There’s these groovy, hypnotic, polyrhythmic moments, but there’s also these bright, jarring, in-your-face elements that snap you out of your groove and back into focus. That was specifically drawn from the way these systems are kind of not that great, but they’re very physical. I was trying to make a song that could be contained within that. 

That’s something you don’t encounter in styles of music that aren’t geared toward DJs: The way a specific space, or even a specific soundsystem, can shape a piece of recorded music so directly.

You can really hear it. Talk about Ben Klock, “Subzero”—that record was made in a lab to be played at Berghain. And then there are hundreds of records that were made for that place and will never even get played there, they’re just made by people who went there a few times and thought, I want to make something that hits in exactly the way that room hits. And Panorama Bar records are completely different. The other room in the same club, totally different records. nd_baumecker, all those records from up there, they have a totally different character. They have an Italo kick drum, and they’re picturing the shutters, and the layout of that room. 

Sometimes, I’ll almost try to imagine a theater play of different people attending a night when I’m DJing. Let’s say it’s a night when I’m headlining; it’s not just a heads-down, keeping the same vibe kind of night. I know people paid money to see me. It’s 1 a.m. at Elsewhere, I’m about to come on after this other guy, let’s go. You start with something extremely attention-grabbing, maybe it’s an intro kind of thing, it gets people going. Track two: even bigger. Then, track three, find the most perfectly good, perfectly boring record. That gets people to settle in. And then I game it out in my mind: I’m picturing someone like, “OK, cool, another tequila soda,” or, “Mark’s still in the bathroom, let’s go find him,” or, “My dealer just got here,” whatever it is. OK, that’s gonna be two and a half songs. So, two or three songs later, I’m like, “What’s the record to reel you back in?” I really try to imagine being the soundtrack to the movie of all these people’s nights out. 

That reminds me, in a roundabout way, of something I remember Wendy Eisenberg saying about a piece she had composed that was like an hour long. And it’s a totally different musical world from what you’re describing, but she was like, if you’re composing at that scale, you have to build in moments for people to tune out. It can’t be action all the time. 

I had to learn that at a certain point. For a long time, my DJ sets were good, but they were exhausting, because I’m just constantly building and building, and it’s exciting the whole time. But when I’m clubbing, I’m not on the dancefloor for 90 minutes or two hours straight. I’m not even on the dancefloor for 35 minutes. You go on the dancefloor, you catch a dance for a few songs, you go give your ears a break, talk to your friends, you go, “Oh, that one sounds good,” you go back in, you come back out. It’s this stream that you can dip in and out of. And to build those ebbs and flows naturally into the thing, and take it in different places—that makes a lot more sense to me now than just pedal-to-the-metal.