Tone Glow 210: John Beltran

An interview with the techno producer about breakdancing, landing his first 12-inch on Carl Craig's Retroactive label, and his new album under the Placid Angles moniker, 'Canada' (2026)

John Beltran

Photo courtesy of the artist

John Beltran (b. 1969) is a musician and producer from Lansing, Michigan. Growing up, Beltran was fascinated by the synthesizers he’d see in music videos on MTV and, once he got his hands on one, obsessively honed his craft. His first release was the 12-inch Aquatic (1991), issued on Carl Craig’s Retroactive label. While Beltran was inspired by various Detroit techno DJs he saw at local venues, his work always took on a more melodic bent than his contemporaries, sumptuous and dreamy in their atmospherics. His career has seen a multitude of releases, from the more UK-leaning sound under the Placid Angles moniker, to the jazz fusion made in his Sol Set band, to the various strains of IDM, downtempo, techno, and Balearic house released under his own name. His latest release is the Placid Angles album Canada (2026). Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with Beltran on February 13th, 2026 via Zoom to discuss his childhood, the feelings that informed his 1996 masterpiece Ten Days of Blue, and the ongoing evolution of his songcraft.

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Joshua Minsoo Kim: I know you were a breakdancer in the early to mid-80s. What memories do you have of that?

John Beltran: Whoa, how do you know that? I had a crew and we all had our skillsets. I was more of an uprocker and footwork guy. I was inspired a lot by the New York Puerto Ricans who had this sick footwork. My buddy Justin was more at the gymnast level, and his flares and windmills were super violent and crazy. There were two or three more guys who had a mixed skillset and could do a bit of everything, but Justin was elite.

We were from an upper-middle-class neighborhood and, it’s not like we would have issues with other neighborhoods anyway, but there was this funny dynamic where we’d be looking for trouble, like, “Let’s battle!” (laughter). That was typical of the culture and time. I remember when I was first getting into breakdancing in 7th grade, me and my buddy were at the mall and saw these girls we really liked. We instantly dropped to the ground and started doing the centipede. Yeah, that was gonna impress them (laughter). So yeah, it was fun. I remember biking around and looking for places to stop and break. We’d carry a boombox.

This was in Lansing?

Yes. Breakdancing was all over. There were different skill levels—people from farm towns were doing it, and they weren’t great at it, but everyone caught the breakdancing bug. I think we were good for a small city. We were influenced by Chicago and Detroit and New York; it wasn’t like Seattle or San Francisco. The Midwest jibed with New York and my father is Puerto Rican, so I was inspired that Puerto Ricans were into that. So whether it was Beat Street (1984) or whatever, it was cool to see Puerto Ricans leading the way.

Do you mind talking to me a bit about your Puerto Rican heritage? Did your father make a strong effort to make sure you were familiar with the culture?

My mother is Mexican, so there were shared cultural qualities in our family—really good food, right? But they never really pushed the culture on us; we didn’t even speak Spanish in the house. My Spanish is… not minimal, but maybe like 25% or 30%. I learned everything on my own as an adult, just from wanting to learn it. A lot of my friends are Hispanic and I picked up a lot along the way, but as a kid, I grew up in a white community. I wasn’t ashamed of my culture but… you put it away, you assimilate, you do these things you’re expected to do in the United States.

After [Bad Bunny’s] Super Bowl halftime show, I was seeing so many Hispanics on social media talking about how moved they were and the pride they felt. That opened up old wounds. There was this one gal talking about politics and she said, “I was a good American. I put my Spanish away. I wanted to be like them.” So to get this affirmation from this performance was crazy for her. And this is something that I’ve moved on from a long time ago—I’m proud of my culture, I have connections to the Latino community—but it was really telling to hear this woman talking about this. And obviously there’s everything with ICE and our government right now.

When did you begin to embrace more of your culture?

Being a young person and dealing with racism, that was early on. It’s traumatic as a kid, but it’s survival mode, y’know? You don’t know who’s gonna come at you, for whatever reason. It could be a Black kid as well, this person who wanted to pick on the Puerto Rican. But I really started to connect with my identity after high school when I was in my early 20s—I started to get into the music of every Latin country. I was getting really into Spanish culture—my grandparents are of Spanish descent—and I started digging deeper. So it’d be the food, the language, and learning things about Spain including the variety of cultures and dialects there. My paternal grandmother’s family was Basque, and there’s a classic Basque dish called bacalao a la vizcaína; it’s big in Puerto Rico, but it’s of Basque descent, so I was connecting the dots. Being into music, and being a head—like we are—we’re kind of this way with everything. Like, I play tennis and I’m very particular about the mechanics. We’re just kind of all-in on anything we like.

What are some of the earliest memories you have related to music?

My father was a promoter for a lot of international artists—Vicente Fernández, Antonio Aguilar, Julio Iglesias. He did a lot of big-time stuff, and his basement is filled with all these pictures of doing this work and meeting Latin icons. So my dad is doing that, he would buy me records, but I had my own freedom to listen to my own music; I was never into Latin music as a kid. My mother was really into Earth, Wind & Fire, and they’re still one of my favorite bands to this day. My sister, when we got older, was into the record clubs. She was my access to playing records at home. She was into alternative music in the ’80s, so The Smiths and Echo & The Bunnymen. She hated it because I would just take her records and say they were mine (laughter). But that was great. We were a musical house. We also had an organ, and I learned everything by ear—I never learned how to read music. The first song I learned was “Subdivisions” by Rush.

So was this an older sister then?

Younger sister, actually. She was ambitious. She was the one who said, “I’m gonna get these records.” So I definitely piggybacked off of that—she was a big influence. I tell these stories to her now and she gets a kick out of it.

At what point did you come to the realization that you wanted to make music yourself?

I was fascinated by synthesizers. MTV moved to new wave in the late ’80s and everything had a synthesizer in it; you’d be watching music videos from Eurythmics or Gary Numan or Duran Duran. Even in Journey’s “Separate Ways (Worlds Apart),” the guy’s just hammering away on this Jupiter-8. It was new. And the sounds just cut so good through the music. It ultimately shifted into predominantly electronic music: the drums were from drum machines, the basslines were from synths. You can think of a-ha or The Human League and how they weren’t playing with these traditional acoustic instruments anymore.

There was this place near me called Marshall Music, which was a music store that had records in the back. I would go and check out records but they also had these synths—they had to be Moogs or Sequentials at the time. This was in the early to mid-80s, and the thing is that they wouldn’t let you play them, especially kids. I kept going back to this store and at one point the guy let me play it… I wish I could feel what I felt in those first days of seeing those synths, touching them, hearing them, and being blown away. That’s what set the tone.

The moment that I wanted to do it was when my buddy let me use an old Casio. It had programmed beats and I started playing basslines over it. I figured out a way to record in this multi-track way with two cassettes. I honestly can’t tell you how I did it but, imagine this: I had two different cassettes, and I would make it so you could hear one playing, but you could also record into this unit. I’d have this cassette playing with the beat I recorded, and then I’d record a bassline with the keyboard, and then I’d put that tape in where the other one was and start it over. It got so hissy, but I figured out how to multi-track. My friends all loved the same music as me and they would listen to my stuff and be like, “This is dope, stick with it.” And I did.

I started looking for new equipment. My cousin lent me this really cool Technics keyboard, and that’s when I started putting everything in motion and making more material. People loved it, and it really inspired me to keep going. This was right out of high school—I was doing men’s league soccer and tennis, I had bartending gigs and stuff like that, and I was just messing around, but I was also in my parents’ basement learning what I really loved. I was captivated by the possibilities.

So you would just go over to your friends’ place and play your tape there?

Yeah. My friends smoked a lot of weed and they’d just be sitting in a room. I didn’t smoke—it was just not my thing—but I’d show up with a tape, they’d pass a joint around, and they’d just listen. I got better really fast because I was obsessed, and I’d sometimes run songs by my friends and play them over the phone. Everything sounded bigger over the phone because you couldn’t tell what the production value was like. You’d go over to someone’s house and it’d be like, “Oh, this isn’t as sweet as we thought.” (laughter). Soon, I was on my way to getting my own keyboard and my own computer.

Were you going to clubs much and hearing music in these spaces?

That was the next level. We had the records, we listened to DJs like The Wizard [aka Jeff Mills], and that was where I got the recipe of what this stuff was supposed to sound like. Being in the club was where the energy came in, and this was the real inspiration. I wanted to get a record played in that space, y’know? One of the places we used to go in my early 20s was The Majestic in Detroit and a guy named Blake Baxter used to play techno. There was more of a rave-y feel to it; it was Detroit but they’d play acid and big UK bangers like “Cubik” by 808 State—stuff that would make the crowd go crazy. I think a lot of people knew that we were experiencing something special. Music had shifted. There was great dance music in the ’80s, but it wasn’t like the disco of the ’70s or the great dance culture of the late ’80s and ’90s at these warehouses—we all knew something was up. You’d always look forward to hearing the new song. I couldn’t tell you what the big song is now, but we all knew back then.

How did hearing these songs at clubs and warehouses influence the way you made your own music?

It was about the energy. You’d turn the music up at home and you’d want it to feel like what you experienced on Saturday night. You’d close your eyes and think, would people go crazy to this, like we did to those other songs? That was a huge part of it. We had training wheels, being in Michigan. Detroit techno was our leader, and it was easy to take some of the aggressive energy that Detroit techno was offering and run with it. It came out in my music, but I wasn’t as aggressive as those guys. I was into Peter Gabriel and Sting and Sade, who I all love dearly now, and I brought a certain lusher and subdued quality to my music whereas their stuff was more raw. I think you could play my music to adults and they’d go, “Oh, that’s nice son.” (laughter). You couldn’t do that with Derrick May’s stuff.

I hear that in your music for sure. “Flex” starts with that abrasive clanging but it still ultimately leads into something warm.

Right. I step away from the abrasive and it becomes more of a chillout record. I was so into Autechre and Aphex Twin and a lot of the Warp stuff. There was also some Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk influence with a Detroit undertone. That record, Ten Days of Blue (1996), was the one where I had used all my tricks.

I wanted to step back a bit and talk about your earliest music. You had the 12-inch with Open House on Damon Booker and Carl Craig’s label, Retroactive. How’d that happen, and what was it like working with Mark Wilson for that record?

Mark was in Lansing and he had this record called “Keep With the Pace” (1990). So he was doing stuff, and he had me over to his studio and liked what I did—he saw potential. He started taking over the beats of my music. My beats were complementary to my stuff, but as far as the early stuff, he brought the real New York drum-machine sound to the music. He elevated “Aquatic” (1991)—I had more of my drums on that originally, and it was more ambient techno than a club tune. Street cred immediately, right? The material on “Aquatic” was always inspired by Mr. Fingers’ “Can You Feel It” (1986) and some Baby Ford stuff that had the square bass thing that was big at the time.

So there was my first track, and we had gone to the best studio in Detroit: Studio A. We initially recorded it in Flint at a small studio, and when we pull up, we see this gold Porsche—who’s car is this? It was Melvin Riley from Ready For the World; he had the session before us.

So, we go in and record it, and then mixed it at Studio A. The mix was so thick. I remember the engineer was like, “I’m gonna throw some flanger on the hats, is that okay?” He totally processed it and made it bump. So I had this song, I went to this record store, and Anthony “Shake” Shakir is there and says, “Give me your number, I’m gonna get this to my friend Carl Craig, who has a label.” He took my number, called me later, and gave me Carl’s number. I played “Aquatic” over the phone to him and he’s like, “I want it.” I didn’t know much about Carl—I knew a couple things—but I was following more of Derrick’s stuff, as well as Mark Kinchen. Carl also did his mixdown for the record, and it’s a lot different. It’s maybe better for a Detroit techno ear. So, “Aquatic” was born and it got licensed to Buzz Records in Belgium and it became a big club tune around the world. That was really great for my first release.

You had all this success early on. What’s your mindset like and what’s your next step?

I was still making tunes, and “Earth & Nightfall” (1993) was the next song I had on the slate. They put that out too. I did the song “Fragile” with it. It was this earthy house music. I was listening to Deep Forest and new age stuff, and that was seeping into my dance music—I was putting birds and whales and shit in there. I was very conscious of the environment as well—that’s one of my lifelong interests and concerns—and it came through in the music.

Can you talk more about conservation and environmentalism and how that plays into your life?

It’s in my diet, for example. I’ve gone through phases where I was a vegetarian or vegan. Now I just don’t eat cows and pigs—it’s about health, first and foremost, but it’s also a moral choice. The farming in this country is really depressing to me. I find my protein in fish, for the most part, but also avocados and eggs and things of that nature. I was a believer and follower of Greenpeace in the ’80s, and that was a big thing at the time—there was a big record that had Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel on it. Environmental activism was popular then. My heroes were leading the way.

You once said in an interview that your music is all about emotion. I can hear that in the first stuff you released, and we kind of talked about this earlier when you said your work wasn’t super raw—this was true with your albums but also the Indio project from 1999. How do you make sure that a song sounds emotional? What were the tricks that you used, that you mentioned earlier, that all ended up on Ten Days of Blue?

I was a lot more emotional in my 20s. I was learning things about myself and the world. And when I expressed myself musically, I would search for the most beautiful ways to speak the message into the song. I was taking from real emotion, but a lot of the things I do now are technical; I’m a low-key dude today, but se still all have feels, right? With Ten Days of Blue, I’d play an arpeggio and I wouldn’t settle. Today I’d be like, “Oh, that’s technically good. I’ll build on that and get this process going.” Back then it was, “I better feel it, I better feel each note.” Any time I turn my gear on now, I can get it done. Back then, I would lose my mind when I couldn’t get the vibe going. I didn’t have the skills yet. A lot of my arpeggios were happy accidents: I’d find chords with both hands, hit record, knock it out, quantize it, and play it back—it’d be way sweeter than I expected. This sort of process inspires you because it’s both you and not you. It’s like, “Man, that sounds better than me.”

Ten Days of Blue is a minimal album—each song only has a maximum of eight tracks. “Soft Summer,” for example, was six or seven tracks. And everything was MIDI. I’d push record on my DAT, push play on the sequencer, and it’d run through. It was a linear thing, and I was bringing in things on the fly. It was like a DJ set. And then I’d record it and play it back and I’d be like, “Yup, I nailed it.” I’d spend hours on the mix though, and it was all done on the keyboard. I didn’t have a mixing board or a DAW—all I had was a computer playing MIDI. There was this thing we had called “system exclusive,” which meant that you could save your levels. That was a mind-blower. I could load up a song in my computer and the system exclusive data would go and shoot all the levels into my keyboards that were hooked up through MIDI. Things are so much easier now.

You said that these songs were coming from the emotions you had at the time. Can you give me an example of when you were trying to capture your feelings with music? Did you use music to process emotions? You have song titles like “Decembers Tragedy”—was there an actual tragedy?

No. My cousin was a bit of a poet and we both had gone through some breakups. He was good at spouting out titles and I did find out “Soft Summer” is just Stevie Wonder’s “Summer Soft” in reverse. We’d be having a couple drinks and he’d just go, “How about this?” And I’d be like, “Oh, that’s dope.” As far as the music side of things, I was melancholy about the particular breakup at the time, and that was the energy. There’s the lead line on “Collage of Dreams” and I’m doing a little pitch bend on it—it was almost like a cry. I was crying through that note. Guitar players do that too.

How were you tapping into your emotions after your 20s then? In the 2000s you’ll have something like the Nostalgic Going Home EP (2006), which still feels really emotional. And obviously there’s all the new stuff you’re releasing.

When I do my Brazilian stuff, it starts with a chord progression and I’m looking for familiar jazz and R&B feelings. That stuff is uplifting. With the Placid Angles stuff, I’m exploring the chord progressions and the melodic palette. I might not be emotional when doing it, but I’ll know from experience. Placid Angles has become its own thing, and I don’t go too far out—it’s mostly female vocal samples, which bring a softness to it. A lot of my samples are melodic, maybe melancholy. It’s sort of a recipe I’m doing over and over with Placid Angles. Maybe I’m using new sounds or a new approach, or maybe the synthesizers are different, but I do always want to stay in that pocket. The John Beltran stuff covers a lot of different things, but it’s in more of a Balearic phase right now. I’ve done some records for MotorCity Wine, which has been more about being outside on your patio and vibes like that, especially since the pandemic. And that’s a nice space for me to be in right now.

It’s funny that you say there’s a narrow range when the new album, Canada (2026), still has stuff like “Hero” which sounds like your take on Burial.

Yeah, and Four Tet. It’s more garage-y.

How did you approach this album compared to the other recent Placid Angles albums? You had The Cry (1997) early on but there have been multiple releases within the past seven years—First Blue Sky (2019), Touch the Earth (2021), The Lotus (2022), A Detroit Summer (2025).

With Touch the Earth, I wanted it to feel like 808 State with some other colors in there, like The Black Dog. With the new one, I wanted to capture everything… I was summing everything up. I think it’s closer to First Blue Sky in spirit, and I think all the songs stand on their own, whereas Touch the Earth is good as a record. Hearing the singles come out verified this for me, that these songs are their own animal. “Hands of Love” was the most fun to work on—it was one of the last tunes, too, and I wanted to do something that sounded like Enigma and the more popular stuff of the ’90s. I wanted it to have a really approachable feel to it. “Canada” has a bit of an Aphex vibe to it, and I meant it to be. So the album is a good look back at music.

How do you approach vocal samples and vocals in general? You have Sophia Stel on “I Want What I Want,” and she makes her own music, too. Were there any difficulties at all?

Not at all. I just let her go and she’s good like that. With samples, I’ll find a cappellas of some obscure shit. Some of it is Celtic stuff because I’m big on Irish culture. Placid Angles has always been a UK-feeling sort of thing, and there’s this Irish-y vibe to the music (laughs). There’s not much to the sampling—I’ll have a vocal be the texture under the whole thing, or sometimes it’ll be the thing on top. But generally, I want it to work with the bass change. Whatever that one line is, the bassline is moving and changing, while that line is just doing its thing and all the color comes from the stuff I’m doing in the back. It’s as simple as that. It’s Electronic Music 101 in terms of the ’90s. That’s what I tried to bring back with Canada—I wanted it to feel like the ’90s.

I was wondering how much of this was coming from your interest in New Age, though some of it comes off as your take on dream pop, too.

Absolutely. Cocteau Twins are big for me. There’s a sort of shoegaze thing in there, especially with the vocals. Female vocals were the shit in the ’90s, whether it was in rock or someone as big as Sarah McLachlan. That was the decade of the ladies. There’s a song on the first Chemical Brothers album, “One Too Many Mornings” (1995), and that was a big influence on my Placid Angles sound, and it’s still big for me. I’d still play that one in a Balearic-type set.

You always had a lot of different styles in your albums. Something like Americano (2002) has “Respectall” and then the “Bossalude” right after, so we have the Latin influence already coming in there. And you have the Sol Set band too, which originally started with “Aztec Girl” (2000).

There’s a lot of sampling on Americano. I think it sounds like shit, sonically. It’s very linear and I was just starting to record audio into my computer—it could only hold so much in the late ’90s. I had sample loops of Latin and salsa music, and it was kind of like my DJ sets at the time. I was doing a lot of acid jazz, Jamiroquai remixes, Mo’ Wax, Stereolab, and I think some of the stuff I did on Indio was connected to my interest in Björk. This was all the beginning of the sort of stuff I’d release on Ubiquity.

I wouldn’t consider a lot of what I did on that record my best productions. I love “Soul Sketching.” That one still has a place in my heart, as does “Siesta Key.” I’m proud of those tunes. There was a long time where I couldn’t even listen to that record, and I still don’t listen to it much, but I love “Caboclo” because of John Arnold’s guitar playing on there. “Respectall” was actually not my track, but John Arnold’s—I just featured him on there. Working with him and Jeremy Ellis was a new thing for me. I wasn’t just in a room making arpeggios; I had these talented cats contributing to my music. And that’s ultimately where the first Sol Set record came in. And that was a big tune, “Aztec Girl.”

Can you tell me a bit about Sol Set? I like that the sound is really aiming for the Brazilian style of jazz fusion and boogie, and it’s clear throughout Olá de Novo (2022). It’s hard not to hear that and think of classics from Marcos Valle and Robson Jorge & Lincoln Olivetti. You talked about collaboration, but what’s it like to work with a bigger band?

We played all our parts live for “Aztec Girl,” though it was done in different sections. I played the Rhodes on that, the bass came in, and John played the guitar. I went through my Ubiquity thing where it was a lot of Latin samples, whether batucada or something else. So I was learning about this music and really educating myself in the early to mid-2000s. It was getting a bit more authentic, incrementally. These projects got closer and closer to what it’s supposed to sound like.

With Olá de Novo, me and my partner were really mapping this out and we wanted to make this an extension of “Aztec Girl.” To me, there’s a lot of Stevie Wonder in there as well. Jeremy played on a couple songs, and we also brought in some new faces, with [singer] Taylor Taylor on a straight-up Sade rip. It was just a matter of being super motivated. It’s a lot of work to bring in a lot of musicians—you’re waiting on parts, you’re waiting on schedules. You gotta be in the mood for that. I think I achieved about 70% of my vision for that record. I think it’s a great record, but I left a little bit on the field. I think I completed everything with the EP, Love Revolution (2025). It’s only four songs, so it was easier to manage, but even though we’re missing Jeremy on that record, it feels done. I got everything out of each of those songs.

What was missing on the album that appears on the EP?

I would’ve loved to have used live drums more, like we did on the “Aztec Girl” remake. I would’ve loved for things to be more live, and not so much produced. There’s the song that Jeremy sings on, “Bliss Mode,” and a lot of that is Native Instruments, and I would’ve preferred to have had live percussion. With Love Revolution, I polished all the corners. “Maragogi” has a total Azymuth vibe, and that’s what I wanted. A lot of it is simple, and I didn’t want to overproduce it.

Are there records throughout your career that you’re 100% happy with, where you accomplished everything you set out to do?

I think the MotorCity Wine ones… my mixing skills have shot up since I started using Pro Tools. Olá de Novo was my first project on Pro Tools, and these records sound really good. I can say that sonically, my music is just really good now. I think Ten Days of Blue is the most articulated album of mine—it’s flawless in retrospect, even though it’s minimal. And that’s probably why it’s flawless. I had my system down at that point. From the early ’90s to that album’s release in ’96, that was just the pinnacle of my sound. I perfected it.

Earth & Nightfall (1995), the record before that, we took that into the studio and it’s overproduced and overmixed, to be honest. If I were to mix it, it would’ve sounded entirely different—it would’ve been more ambient than club-driving. So that’s why I think Ten Days of Blue is the perfect record of that era. Sonically, it’s the most important thing, and emotionally, it nails it. I’m also really proud of a record I compiled for Delsin, Music For Machines (2014). I think that’s an underrated ambient record, and I put it up against anybody in any era. The artists I put on there aren’t really well known and, all together, it’s one of the nicest ambient records I’ve ever heard. It’s all thanks to them—they’re the stars of it. And that about rounds it up. I’ve done so much. I’m still proud of everything, too—I wouldn’t have put out the records if I wasn’t.

Is there anything we didn’t talk about today that you wanted to mention?

I plan on playing some live shows this summer that’ll feature tracks from Canada, but I also just finished a record for Music For Dreams. It’s in the Ten Days of Blue vein, though a bit more produced—it’s not as minimal. It has a lot of the same feels because I use a lot of the same gear. I think people are gonna sense some of those same Ten Days of Blue feelings, as well as some new things I have to say. We’re really excited about it. I just finished it today, and it’ll maybe be out this fall.

I end all my interviews with the same question and I wanted to ask this to you. Do you mind sharing one thing you love about yourself?

I’m empathetic, and I can put myself in other people’s perspectives. I’m glad that I can feel.

John Beltran’s new album as Placid Angles, Canada, is out now via Oath.

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