Through albums and EPs, Jean RN takes us through some of his favourite work.
Ipswich innovator Jean RN has invited Happy deep into the inner workings of his mind, taking us on a journey through his glowing discography.
From his first albums in 2021, HOT GIRL and COMPULSIVE LIAR, to his latest EP release in 2023, SKID MARKZ , Jean RN has selected some of his favourite tracks and broken them down for us.
Discussing both his inspirations and his creative processes, Jean RN demonstrates the complex journey of making music and gives us a retrospective of his work.
So chuck in your headphones, turn on some Jean RN and have a read of what he has to say below.
‘D.O.T.E (2020)’
This was the first song I made for Jean RN! At the time I was listening to a lot of Lo-fi emo stuff, like Weatherday, Brave Little Abacus and The Microphones – most of the music I was writing around that time was very much in that vein.
I remember having such a strong vision for Jean RN as a lofi project…it’s funny how quickly that naturally phased out across my following EPs.
Also interesting that while this is sonically my least accessible (noisy, bad singing, bad mixing), it’s compositionally the most straight-forward and ‘basic’ pop song I’ve made so far.
I think I might have been inspired by the messy love-drunk aesthetic of The 1975’s ‘Sex’ at the time – not too sure.
‘Donkatsu I’ – COMPULSIVE LIAR EP
So yeah, in March 2020 I was stuck at home for a couple of weeks during England’s first lockdown, bored out of my mind.
I spent a day on my DAW just messing around with a bunch of cheesy Korean pop songs that a friend had sent over, seeing how I could mangle these samples into something completely unrecognisable from music itself.
I was super into the idea of dense and chaotic plunderphonics music, stuff that kinda sloshes around the stereo field with no discernible compositional framework – though in practice I learned that I just didn’t have the patience to make that kind of thing (yet? who knows).
I ended up taking just a short clip from that sound design session (that industrial machine-sounding motif playing a 3/4 rhythm, which is just an acoustic guitar caked in effects) and built a song from that.
I was really enamoured (and still am!) with ‘R Plus 7’ era Oneohtrix Point Never, and Rival Consoles/Four Tet type microhouse stuff – whose sounds only appear in short sections of the song, but my headcanon is that this song is my take on those sounds.
While I was making COMPULSIVE LIAR I had no intention of releasing the songs; they were made purely out of the joy I get from creating.
I think that’s part of why the EP seems to be the most popular among my listeners on Bandcamp. It was only after showing a few people the songs that I was encouraged to upload them into the great unknown.
‘I Wasn’t Ready’ – HOT GIRL EP
I recorded HOT GIRL and COMPULSIVE LIAR at the same time; while COMPULSIVE LIAR was the product of exploratory sessions of experimentation, HOT GIRL was a collection of songs more focused on a relationship I was in at the time.
Where CL had a throw-everything-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks ethos, I kept things more constrained on HG; all the drums had to come from my Korg Volca Beats drum machine; every song had to contain brass elements (because why not); every song had to use a sample from a pre-decided selection of songs which pertained to memories of the person I was writing about.
These limitations coupled with the fact that I was still in the early stages of my producer journey made for a pretty dark-sounding and generally muddy EP.
It’s definitely my least favourite project of mine, but was still a lot of fun to make! This particular track is a whole lot of Time Hecker worship, with some Phil Elverum worship toward the end.
‘Ponytail II’ – Laughing Alone, Eating Salad EP
Laughing Alone, Eating Salad was written around the time the other two EPs were being made, but I didn’t get round to actually recording it until a year after.
My listening habits had been leaning increasingly pop-wards – I was completely obsessed with Charli xcx’s ‘how i’m feeling now’, and DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ’s ‘Charmed’ had honestly changed my life.
I was thinking a lot about how I could incorporate my sample-heavy weirdness into a more digestible pop framework – I wanted the melodies to be catchier, the mix to be cleaner, and the emotions more forward (thinking about it, Ponytail II is probably not the best song to exemplify this, but hey, I’m sticking with it).
I had recently moved out of my Mum’s house and was feeling freer to record more vocals, freer to explore that side of my music. I was learning some hard truths about life (and myself), and was ready to face them with a project.
The first minute of this song’s instrumental is a repurposed WIP of mine from years ago (entitled ‘Ponytail’, hence this being ‘Ponytail II’) – the original track was taking inspiration from the initial Future Bass boom (think Wave Racer, Cosmo’s Midnight… any Soundcloud producer from Australia putting stuff out in the 2010s – that’s what I was going for), and it was a cool experience repackaging that to fit my current tastes.
My sister threw some vocals down at the end of the track, which is nice.
Out of everything I’ve put out, Laughing Alone, Eating Salad is the project I’m happiest with.
I feel I got the balance of electronic, pop and emo sounds I was going for. I don’t really like listening to my own stuff after it’s out, but whenever I hear this it takes me back to the headspace I was in when making it. My own personal time capsule.
‘Sure’ – SKID MARKZ EP
I wanted to make something fun and dumb after Laughing Alone, Eating Salad (which honestly, could get a bit self-serious at times), so I banged out the blueprints of SKID MARKZ in a couple of weeks (the songs themselves took forever to actually finish, but the core ideas stayed the same throughout).
I can’t actually remember any specific influences on this track in particular, so let me talk about vocal processing!
In a lot of vaporwave music you’ll often hear the vocals in a sample pitched down and stretched, giving this really heavy but ethereal quality.
It works because the instrumental sections of those same samples are also pitched down and stretched (duh) so it all exists in that same world – unnaturally realistic.
For whatever reason, the vocals in vaporwave are what anchor me as a listener. In my first couple of EPs I started emulating this sound with my own voice – though looking back that probably started out of insecurity, wanting to mask my voice with effects so as to draw attention away from it.
As I’ve been getting more comfortable with myself as a person, I’ve been gradually transitioning into presenting my natural voice more, but I’m still a sucker for that low-formant sound.
You hear it in a lot of Madeon’s work. I’m pretty pleased with how the vocal chain came out in ‘Sure’ – it’s more subtle than in my earlier projects but still definitely there.
Maybe this effect will always be part of me… perhaps I’d be better suited to exclusively releasing ‘Slowed + Reverbed’ versions of my songs.
‘Stye Week’
2024 is the year I fell back in love with electronic music – A.G Cook, death’s dynamic shroud, Galen Tipton and Skee Mask are to blame.
I’ve been making a lot of dancier, more traditionally-electronic (whatever that even means) music, and Stye Week is my first release from this little phase.
Half IDM, half ambient. It’s out on Electric Exchange’s latest compilation on Bandcamp, which features the work of some crazy talented artists from across the globe – definitely worth checking out!
If you go to Lucid Rhythm’s Youtube channel, you’ll find endless videos of polyrhythm experiments set to soothing visuals.
Essentially 12-20 voices will produce a chord at the start of the video, and then each voice repeats itself at a different rate from the others.
In the early moments you’ll hear cascading arpeggios getting slower and slower, until the voices start to overlap each other, developing unique relationships amongst themselves.
Different rhythms will arise and morph, before dissipating. Time ceases to exist – just those voices in the universe.
The videos last hours and they’re really beautiful. Stye Week was my attempt to use this polyrhythmic technique in a song – the ‘chang’ sample at the beginning marks the start of the cycle, which continues for the whole 7 minutes.
The sounds of the voices change, as do the chords being played, but the rate of the notes remain consistent throughout. I think it’s pretty cool!
Check out Jean RN’s latest EP, SKID MARKZ, on Bandcamp here.
