26/01/11
Perhaps a genuine employer, or perhaps an electro-prophet, we have a man called Oli …… to thank for one of the most original and boundary-breaking electronic acts of today. He was the man that gave two young boys after-school jobs in his record store, and the opportunity to ignite their DJ careers. He gave us dancefloor fillers and indie killers and dance-punk festival favourites. He gave us Jens and Isi, or Digitalism as they are better known…
How did you go from working in a record shop together, to you forming Digitalism?
I worked there after school and Isi followed later; we bonded over our love of records. We started to DJ together and it was quite fun, so we kept it that way. After some time, we wanted some stuff of our own that we could include into the DJ set, so we started to do some edits at home and then this turned into setting up a studio a few years later and coming up with our own songs because we always wanted to say that we had something special that others didn’t have.
It’s said that you blur the boundaries between indie and dance, but do you see yourself first and foremost as a rock band, or a dance act?
I think we started as a dance act and now see ourselves as a band. What we’ve experienced with, like, playing festivals for three years now, is that people have kind of accepted us as a band on stage, because we’re not just hiding behind the electric stuff on stage. The sound is quite band-ish and there’s quite a lot of action on stage; I’m singing and Isi’s playing the e-drums on top and everything, so we kinda feel like a two-man band. It’s a bit different now to how it started, just making songs for clubs!
Was the merging of indie and electro a conscious thing?
Not really, no. We set up the studio in a World War II bunker; it’s really dark in there and so it has this feeling of being really naked and rough and we always had to share it with other bands, so there always lots of live instruments in there. We were just playing around with the stuff and that’s the result – we didn’t really think about what our music would sound like. We did this fusion many years ago already and that was just, like, what excited us most. We kept it that way; we see it as a kind of Digitalism sound – all of our songs have that Digitalism signature so that you know what it is. It just happened naturally.
What sets you apart from other electronic outfits?
I think it’s the fact that we write proper songs, like we don’t only see our songs being for clubs – that’s not the intention at all. I mean, our songs for