Both sides now DFA balance the dance and the rock BY CARLY CARIOLI

Ever since James Murphy and Tim Goldsworthy produced the Rapture’s "House of Jealous Lovers," the house/post-punk manifesto that launched a thousand indie-rock dance nights, the DFA have been known as a rare, bilingual breed: a rock guy who speaks dance music and a dance-music guy who speaks rock. Their remixes of N.E.R.D., Chromeo, Fischerspooner, and Metro Area are in demand from London to Tokyo; they helped Radio 4 make post-punk guitar licks dance, taught Le Tigre how to disco, and profiled so hard that even Britney Spears came calling. Their latest client is Trent Reznor, whose single the DFA are determined to make into what a source close to the duo calls "the gayest disco song of all time." By the end of last year, though, the Rapture’s major-label debut had been declared DOA at Universal, and the duo’s DFA Records imprint fell mysteriously silent. But before the world could write off the partnership, out came the vault-emptying three-disc DFA Compilation #2, a road map to recent developments in below-the-radar dance music, including tracks by Murphy’s solo vehicle LCD Soundsystem, Delia & Gavin, Liquid Liquid, and J.O.Y. and unearthed DFA-produced tracks by Pixeltan and Liquid Liquid. Everyone seems to agree that the DFA did the impossible: they got indie kids interested in dance music again and persuaded the often-fickle dance-music miniverse to take a chance on rock. But how? "It’s a strange thing," acknowledges Jonathan Galkin, who manages DFA Records. "This is the guy" — Murphy — "who learned how to produce from Steve Albini. And now he’s on the cover of the same magazines that three years ago had Sasha and Digweed on the cover."

It hasn’t been easy, and not everyone — even artists they’ve produced — always gets it. Not long ago, Jon Spencer commissioned the DFA to remix the Blues Explosion song "Mars Arizona." As they often do, the DFA overhauled the track, stripping it to a skeleton and building it back up piece by piece — not just re-editing but re-recording to add Murphy’s distinctive flat, dull-throb bass licks and the clipped, handclap-like beats that Goldsworthy excels at. The original was two and a half minutes long; the DFA remix clocks in at around 11, building in the final three minutes to a frenzied whirlpool of toxic synth zaps. Spencer wanted to cut the final three minutes — precisely the portion of the song guaranteed to freak the dance floor.

Although the DFA eventually prevailed — the song will be included on a DFA remix compilation coming out later this year — it’s an example of how difficult it can be for them to balance both sides of the dance-rock equation. Rapture frontman Luke Jenner is more blunt. As he told me last summer, "They’re incredibly controlling people. They were really hard to work with. . . . James is a super control freak."

One person who knows Murphy well is John Maclean, a/k/a the Juan Maclean, whose "By the Time I Get to Venus" was among the first singles released by DFA Records. The label, which recently inked an international distribution deal with EMI, will release the Juan Maclean’s debut album this summer. Now a father of two living in Dover, New Hampshire, Maclean grew up in Boston going to hardcore shows at the Rat during the heyday of the This Is Boston, Not LA scene. His band Six Finger Satellite, based out of Providence in the early ’90s, were in many ways a prototype for the DFA’s merger of clanging post-punk and classic dance music. When Murphy ranted about Can, Beefheart, vintage Detroit techno, Suicide, and Pere Ubu on LCD Soundsystem’s anthem "Losing My Edge," he evoked a kind of gonzo description of Six Finger Satellite’s śuvre. But 10 years ago, the world wasn’t ready for it.

Maclean and Murphy met while each were building his own recording studio around 1990. They bonded over a shared love of dance music at a time when techno carried no cachet in indie rock. "You might as well have said you listened to country music," Maclean says. When Murphy became 6FS’s soundman, he built a mammoth PA system that he dubbed Death from Above, a name he also scrawled on a military-style T-shirt that he wore almost every night. Murphy and Maclean liked to think of the PA as their version of a Jamaican dancehall sound system, but with a punk kick: Murphy "would make it so punishingly, deafeningly loud that you had no choice except to deal with it head-on," Maclean recalls. Like Martin Swope in Mission of Burma a decade earlier, Murphy became a de facto fifth member of 6FS: from the soundboard, he would rig a Roland 606 drum machine to a Roland 202 synthesizer and open their shows with an intensely loud barrage, "like this early Aphex Twin or Kraftwerk kind of thing," Maclean says. "People would literally start looking around, like, ‘What the hell?’ Because at that time, even in between sets, you’d never hear a drum machine."

Unwittingly, Six Finger Satellite were sketching a new canon that the DFA would codify a decade later. Although 6FS were often described as a cross between Big Black and Devo, Maclean’s biggest influences were Helios Creed’s late-’70s band Chrome and the gay, crypto-fascist German electronic duo DAF, whose music 6FS openly pillaged. 6FS were also known to drive around listening to homemade compilations of Lipps Inc. and Chaka Khan singles; ice-cold disco beats and bass lines crept into an assault based on mechanized, militaristic lurches and wiry, scissoring guitar licks. "We were wrapped up in bands like the Birthday Party," Maclean says, "and then we’d get together and take all these drugs and start playing music, and I guess that’s just naturally what’s going to come out."

Fueled by inter-band tensions and escalating drug use (bassist Kurt Niemand would die of an overdose in 1995), 1994’s vinyl-only Machine Cuisine found the group ditching guitars for synthesizers on what became their most abrasive album to date — one that became a major influence on the Providence avant-rock scene that emerged a couple of years later, including future DFA signees Black Dice, who formed at RISD in 1997. "It seems weird that the only entirely electronic record we made would be the angriest," Maclean says. "That was definitely the period of the most bitterness in the band." On the ensuing tour, the group piled every amp it could find into their backline. "It would be this punishing, minimal electronic stuff coming out of it," he adds, "and it just really freaked people out."

Even when the guitars returned on 1995’s Severe Exposure and 1996’s Paranormalized, the synths stayed, and the result was a feral amalgam of new wave and brutish punk rock underlaid by frigid, robotic rhythms. "If a band came out today that sounded like Paranormalized," Galkin says, "they’d be signed to a huge record deal, sight unseen."

By the time Murphy produced 6FS’s final album, Law of Ruins, his friendship with Maclean had become a sore point among the other members of the band: they resented Murphy’s outside influence on the group and even refused to pay him. (Maclean eventually paid Murphy off in vintage synthesizers.) "Making that album with James was pretty much the final nail in the coffin of Six Finger Satellite," Maclean says. "At the end of the day, they made me pick sides. I went with James, and that was basically the end of the band."

In New York at the turn of the century, Murphy resurrected "Death from Above" as the title of a recurring dance party he threw with his new production partner, Tim Goldsworthy, an Englishman he’d met working on a David Holmes album. Murphy and Goldsworthy are almost polar opposites: Murphy prefers to play every instrument in the studio whereas Goldsworthy can barely fake his way through keyboard parts. A superb drum programmer who cut his teeth in the group U.N.K.L.E., Goldsworthy is also described as a masterful arranger, editor, and songwriter whose skills shine brightest in collaboration. Maclean says that part of what makes Goldsworthy invaluable is his ability to say, especially to musicians brought up on the rock side of the tracks, "I know you think this beat sounds cool, but it’s been done before — it’s kind of a cliché — and you don’t really want to go there." Murphy is the higher-profile of the two thanks to LCD Soundsystem; Goldsworthy is more comfortable behind the scenes. The recent DFA single "Casual Friday" is credited to Black Leotard Front — itself the Italo-disco alter ego of DFA Records stars Delia & Gavin — but Goldsworthy was an uncredited co-writer and programmer on the track.

By 2000, Murphy’s "Death from Above" parties had migrated to the tiny East Village Plant Bar. Once again, Murphy built an enormous PA designed to punish; and in stark contrast to the prevailing DJ scene, which was centered on deep house and trance, his Friday-night sets spanned classic disco, Talking Heads, new wave, Chicago house, and krautrock. The bartender was a young Luke Jenner, and the room became a hangout for such future DFA collaborators as Metro Area’s Morgan Geist, Tim Sweeney, and Felix da Housecat. The club was eventually shuttered. But by then Murphy and Goldsworthy had their own studio and a record that no one seemed to know what to do with but that they were convinced would be a hit: "House of Jealous Lovers."

In September 2001, Galkin convinced the pair to form a record label, which set up shop upstairs from the studio, in a building on Seventh Avenue at 13th Street. That same week, they watched the World Trade Center fall, and they quickly decided that it was the wrong time for a label called Death from Above. They settled on DFA.

Maclean became an unlikely link between the old indie-rock model and what was emerging as its new, dancefloor-friendly face. Although he’d quit making music for several years and was living in New Hampshire, he’d stayed in touch with Murphy, who finally persuaded his old friend to buy a sampler and start building tracks. Maclean knew of the New York club scene only what he read in magazines, and when he noticed people talking about something called "electroclash," he initially thought they meant electro records made 20 years ago. His first DFA single, "By the Time I Get to Venus," was, he says, his attempt at ripping off Herbie Hancock’s "Rockit." "I was literally sitting and listening to that record trying to copy the drum beat and the bass line. And ‘Venus’ is what I ended up with, because I was too incompetent."

DFA Records’ most recent batch of singles includes the Juan Maclean’s "I Robot"/"Less Than Human," songs that actually predate "By the Time I Get to Venus." What some have taken as evidence of an icier, electro-ish regression is actually proof of how far he’s come. Although most of Maclean’s singles have been instrumentals, the album he’s releasing in June features vocals and forsakes eight-minute journeys for cohesive songcraft. Still, he says, "I think that my album is actually the most electronic and the most outright, flat-out dance music of anything on DFA Records. Which is funny, because I’m the one who came out of a flat-out rock band." More and more, that seems to be the kind of tables-turned transformation that’s par for the course in the DFA’s universe.