- In Heaven, you're always on the guestlist, the beer's free and the DJ drops the good part over and over. On Earth at the Casbah, Axel Willner, AKA The Field, and John MacLean, AKA The Juan MacLean, showered the San Diego crowd with sonic largess: endlessly danceable, impossibly extended mixes that dropped like manna from paradise.
On headphones, the Field has this trick of unfurling a little earworm sample into an expansive soundscape. Live, they start big and go bigger. Accompanied by bass guitar, percussion and glockenspiel, Willner took the sibilance out of "The Little Heart Beats So Fast" and cranked up the disco thump. What sounds like crystalline arpeggio at home sounds like glaciers colliding on stage.
Played live, the new album material, titular "Yesterday and Today" and "The More That I Do," have a shimmering muscularity that's not immediately evident on record—what fishermen call "shoulders" on a salmon. Hunched over, twiddling knobs, Willner unleashed loop after bombastic loop until my sinus cavities were vibrating in resonant frequency, but rather than leaving me worn out, the effect was one of frigid freshness, like a swim in a snowmelt river.
But any Kompakt chill Willner left in the room was soon blasted out by sweaty DFA fervor. The Juan MacLean (who tends to put out staid, slightly punk-smirking electro along the lines of labelmate/BFF James Murphy) had a live treat in store for us as well. Rising above songs dipped in slopping gobs of reverb and pummeled by a relentless crossfire between live drum hits and severe 808 kick/snare patterns, the voices of MacLean and co-vocalist Nancy Whang managed to register sharp and clear and occasionally charming, though the conversational boy-girl counterpoint that colors The Future Will Come gets lost in the squall.
Fact: John MacLean is a kickass theremin player. Anyone who tells you otherwise has been drinking stupid juice. He hand-wiggles out entire melodies while the lower half of his body is having a dance party. It's kind of incredible, actually.
As a live act, whatever archness underpins singles like "One Day" retreats from the disco assault. The instrumentation trades its synthpop reserve for manic thump—joyous and wicked exhausting. If there was a flaw to the set, it was the lack of a breakdown to allow the crowd to draw a needed breath between workouts.
The highlight of the evening by a significant margin was the Juan MacLean's nearly 15-minute version of single "Happy House." Every orgiastic crescendo seemed to reveal an even more accelerated escalator toward the sky. The good parts had good parts of their own and what seemed at first like a verse-chorus structure turned out to be chorus-to-double chorus -to-megachorus-to -choruspocalypse experience. When the band finally strode off stage, the audience looked less like the electro scene bros and dragged-along GFs they were and more like victims of some maniacal Bikram yoga instructor who forced his students to strike speed poses at 300bpm for an hour in a room heated to 105 degrees Fahrenheit.