by Alessandro Ludovico

'Digital with human touch', this is often a synthetic description of your music. Do you think we're getting used by interfacing ourselves with machines in a more and more symbiotic relationship, or we're losing part of our primordial instincts?
DAT Politics is a three members band, it's quite important! We're using very simple softwares. We're not digital slaves. In studio or on stage, we're just using our computers as any kind of tools / instruments and really working as very classical rock band, we're not immersed into programming codes... There are a lot of exchange between human voices, acoustic sounds and pure digital abstraction... This relation between us and all these sounds which belongs to our hard disks is obvious and the laptop is just a kind of peripheric...

Do the visual aspect of sound (sound waves, sequencing structure), visualized on the LCD screens influences your music in any way? And, if this is true, how?
Maybe, it's also one aspect of our working method, but, our favorite software 'sound club' is all made of squares and lines, all this pixel can't get off of our heads anymore... Maybe this influence our way to do music and create images? But it's definitely influence the aspect of our eyes!

The laptop is gaining its definitive status of '(electronic) music instrument'. Do you think laptop music is becoming a 'cultural paradigm'?
Nowadays, laptop music doesn't mean anything, of course there is a clichŽ of the laptop music, but fortunately there are more more fresh air in this 'scene'. The sense of this label is more and more foggy, even if it sounds bizarre, a lot of different people can hide themselves behind a Macintosh screen !

What's the funniest electronic toy (or gadget) you ever used? What's the most interesting feature you ever used on your computer?
Recently, we found a new instrument in a shop of the Salvation Army, it's a kind of cheap electronic drum for children... We're using it live and people becomes crazy about it! The sound is of course very funny, but the good thing of this story is that you don't need to be rich to do the show and it really fits our budget!

Did you ever performed by a remote place (i.e. from home to a club) via a telematic connection? Do you think 'mobility' in composing and performing would be an 'aesthetic factor' in contemporary music?
Of course the laptop was created around this 'mobility' notion, it was like bringing for the first time your own home studio on the stage. But the organic communication is more exciting! For example, we're at the moment in Vienna, we played at the Rhiz, you can follow concert from there by the Internet. We know that some people watch our gig from their place but we would rather them to be in the audience to shake the room.

What's your creative relationship with the technical 'error'? Do you provoke recording or processing 'errors' and use them in your tracks? Did you ever find an unintentional error that let you discover an unusual technique or sound?
We're working with cheap and old laptops for a long time and the digital error is an important part our our production, these machines are so fucked up! Sometimes you intentionally keep some bugs and the best moment is when you re-discover them in listening to the album... It's right on this point that we want to work in a pop context...

What is the most fun musical software you ever used? And why?
Our main software is called 'sound club', it was originally created to do music for 8 bits video games... That's why the sound is sometimes so low-fi.. It's really easy to make stupid melodies and rhythms... We also like very much using small shareware like 'Mousing' or 'Spongefork' (some kind of theremin) which can be controlled in only moving your mouse..

Suppose that you'd be commissioned to program a music videogame for the internet. What'd be its main characteristics?
First the video game should be a kind of doom in which armed turtle would shout with 'ultra-sound-uzi' on some big blue-white-&-red sculptures, called Boulez. Of course the music would be the one originally used for this kind of games!

What do you think of the anti-piracy cd protections (the ones that made an audio cd unable to be played on a cd-rom)? Does it make sense for you?
We don't really care about it, as label owners we just try to do the most beautiful packaging of the world, then people are happy to buy it!