Chicago producer and multi-instrumentalist Dan Jugle got hooked on electronic music in the mid-90s, when he had to find his way to raves without being old enough to drive. Shortly after he turned 16, he started messing around with analog equipment to make his own music. He fell in love with techno, and in recent years he’d earned a reputation for the waterlogged club tracks he made with Juzer (a duo with Beau Wanzer) and the raw, throbbing cuts he recorded with Dar Embarks (a duo with childhood friend Ken Zawacki). Last Thursday, Dar Embarks played Smart Bar, one of the most respected electronic-music venues on the continent. But it was the last time Jugle performed live—he died this past weekend at age 37.
As Jugle became entrenched in electronic music, he kept making rock too. In the late 90s he became the keyboardist for an indie-rock outfit called Written in the Sand, which Kalis says was more a joke than a band—at least until Jugle entered the picture. Kalis would later come aboard himself. “Dan would take joke projects, or things you didn’t take seriously, and take them very seriously,” he says. “Written in the Sand actually became a full six-piece band that made a record, toured, and everything, because Jugle believed in it.” Before breaking up in 2003, the group released one full-length, 47 Ursae Majoris (Johann’s Face). On Jugle’s 21st birthday, in 2002, Written in the Sand played the Fireside Bowl, and he took over vocals for a cover of Beat Happening’s “Bad Seeds.”Jugle also played the Fireside with Ghost Arcade, a project that had evolved out of his early experiments with Broers and Zawacki. “Our first show was opening for Quintron and Magas at the Fireside,” Broers says. The trio approached techno from a punk perspective, restricting their bristling, minimal tracks to three minutes or less. “Dan just wanted to get together with people, work on music, and play shows, and he didn’t really care about releasing records,” Broers says. “I put on pressure to manifest these things, and that’s the reason why this stuff exists.” In 2001 Ghost Arcade self-released the CD Coded Performance, and in 2003 they put out Mr. Bossa Suicide, the debut of Ghost Arcade LTD, a seven-inch label Broers had launched to release unconventional techno that blurred together punk, harsh electro, and minimal synth. “Ghost Arcade was doing all that stuff before it was trendy,” Beau Wanzer says.Mr. Bossa Suicide – GA001 by Ghost Arcade Wanzer met Jugle in the early 2000s, while working with Broers at Jim Magas’s Wicker Park shop, Weekend Records & Soap. Wanzer was impressed by Jugle’s knowledge. “I learned a lot about equipment and gear,” he says. “He’d play some rare techno song from the 90s, and he could tell you exactly what instrument was played, exactly what effect.” Wanzer and Jugle began jamming in the mid-2000s, but didn’t start recording together till five or six years ago.
