Dealing out bro hugs, relaxed euphoria, and even a little bit of weepy heart-break, Digitalism’s upcoming LP is a studio set fixed to sound more natural and focused than its more “canned”, idealistic predecessor. More minded to protect the band’s musical intentions, as well as, ironically, give a little love to the ladies who felt left out on the band’s previous effort, I Love You, Dude is also a record that took over a year to write and produce and, as URB found out, even changed the duo’s own creative working style. Read below for our interview with Jence Moelle, the blonder half of the Digi brotherhood and look for I Love You, Dude to hit stores in the U.S. on Tuesday, July 5th.
URB: I think what caught me first and foremost about I Love You, Dude was the message that even a medium like music, if abused or dominated significantly, can lose its feminine presence. Was the intent of that message geared mostly towards the male faction of your audience or are there particular subtleties on the LP that express to women how mainstream musical output is being leached of empathy?
JM: We do indeed feel like there is a lot of testosterone-filled music out there at the minute. For a couple of years, club music tends to get harder by the month, artists play with masks and stage dive all the time, the front rows are filled by people who just want to moshpit regardless what kind of music is being played. We felt like we have to bring back the sexiness. We missed the ladies. The title is an expression that stems from a perfect sundowner moment, after you’ve soaked up the sun on the beach maybe, and you’re with your friends, waiting for the night to start. Lots of stuff has become so plastic over the last years, plastic and abstract, like music that is no longer vinyl but files on a computer, software that does everything for you in the studio, you know… We want to point out that it’s always worth going back to a path that is frequented by real people and that is not completely uptight or anti-everything. Yes, bring back the empathy. This album is much more human and down-to-earth than the first one. Hence the title.
URB: Your first full-length record, “Idealism”, pointed out the problems western society created by being positive about EVERYTHING. Do you feel like the result of idealistic thinking was that individual person lost the ability to feel self-confidence?
JM: We didn’t think so much about that. Self-confidence this or that, Idealism was focusing on making most out of everything, which is a good thing in our eyes, and it will definitely make your life more exciting. This doesn’t necessarily create problems, probably only when it hits other people’s privacies.
It’s different of course when you say it’s all about being positive about everything, like it is proposed by the world of commercials and nowadays on social networks as well (we’ve read about some DJ “absolutely killing it” about 100 times a day, 365). When you rely too much on promotion and advertising and you start to believe the stuff you say there instead of the things you’ve actually done and achieved, you’re far away from yourself, indeed.
URB: Is I Love You, Dude meant to make empathetic, imaginative individuals feel like they are really great persons after all? If, yes, how?
JM: No. Title and the actual album music are completely disconnected from each other. We like being silly and adding twists to things, and this one would be the label for the bottle of wine we just created, with something on it that tells you absolutely nothing about what’s in it.
In fact, the songs on this album aren’t so much about praising imaginative characters, like in “Pogo” from the first album. They’re more like care, cure or insurance that these characters do get help or have a friend.
URB: A significant difference between the first LP and this latest one, is that, unlike the first record, the second doesn’t have a consistent approach to sonic production or musical arrangement. The opening track to I Love You, Dude is very anthemic, almost cinematic, and the second track on the record, “2 Hearts”, feels very small and is reflective of the manipulative methodology implemented in “pop music production”. Is the imbalance between optimism and lack of self-confidence I’m feeling created by you intentionally?
JM: Everything on this record is created in full intention. Although we are pretty loose when it comes to details, we always know what is happening there. We let it happen or we don’t. This time, the music on the album is more extreme, it spread tempo-wise as well as in keys, the amount of melodies, cinematography and intimacy. It was a logical next step for us after “Idealism”: In our not longer bi-, but now multipolar music each branch became a power injection. There are more classical songs on “I Love You, Dude”. We took over where we stopped the last time with “Pogo”, because “songs” was a quite intriguing and fun thing for us. We spent more time writing the melodies for the tracks on the new album than on the first one. Usually for us the music is there first and we see what we can write on top, but that never works. So this time we had the music and we broke it up again to paste it in once we knew about all the keys and chords that were happening. “2 Hearts” is a very intimate one, it’s written in b-minor.
We like sequencing in waves and in contrasts; for us, it all belongs together, and the sum of everything on the album makes it more than that, it adds something new to it. We always do this – we’ve done it on Idealism, and we do this in our DJ or live sets too. And also, newly we found this new attribute that can influence a sequence and describe a track: How “wide” it is. We didn’t have very intimate songs on “Idealism”. Now we can drop something slow but huge, followed by something very electronic but also intimate, just to open things up again with a more epic next song following.
URB: What did you intend to say by fracturing the structural integrity of a mediated message being released to the public at this particular moment in contemporary history?
JM: Edge and controversy is always a good thing and is probably what separates things from perfect and boring spheres and shapes, flawlessness or just plasticity. It is important to bring this back every now and then.
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