Asher Roth The Lounge / 127 votes More

Time The Lightswitch / 2807 votes More

Nat Kendall Dignified Man / 42 votes More

Karina Nistal Sweet Rain / 74 votes More

U-N-I Beautiful Day / 149 votes More

Catching Air : The Best Summer Parties

by Asya Shein

Disco at the Edge of the Universe

by Jen Boyles

CSS: Choose Life!

by Michael Vasquez

Synths of Resistance! : Argentina's Digital Cumbia

by Eve Hyman

Digitalism :: Idllyic Idealists

By Aaron Richter   Photography by Jacopo Pandolfi

05/24/07 :: URB 147

Jens met Isi at a record store in Hamburg, Germany—which is where our story begins. Introduced to house music at age 11 through the dance charts that would play on local German radio, Jens “Jence” Moelle took a job in his late teens at the local shop that specialized in house and garage LPs to learn more about the music he was currently DJing. There, he met Ismael Tuefecki (or “Isi” as Moelle refers to him, “like Easy Rider”).

“I was working there and still going to school at the time, and Isi was a frequent customer,” says Moelle. “He was kind of the same age as me—he’s three years ahead. But we were the youngsters compared to all the other serious old DJs buying stuff there.”
     
Shared interests led to shared DJ sets, which led to a few computer edits when standard club fare went stale, and eventually the two acquired their own studio to birth a hedonistic amalgamation of punk-kissed, synth-frenzied robot rock with an electro soul that they called Digitalism.

Moelle’s musical background and studio savvy clicked with Tuefecki’s keen ear for moving a crowd, and what Moelle refers to as “all these crazy ideas” were whittled down to a handful of Kitsune-backed singles, including “Zdarlight” and “Jupiter Room,” as well as the white-label Cure reinvention “Digitalism in Cairo,” songs that have become ubiquitous club staples that sound as fresh as they did when they first hit the scene.
    
With the DJ crates conquered, Digitalism’s next move was figuring out how to cull all this oppressively gnarly bass and acid-melt face-plants into a full-length compendium, yet one that avoided merely sounding like a pedestal to showcase their established money shots. The resulting debut, Idealism (Astralwerks), plays as succinct and focused as a full record as any one of its elements. “It’s one whole piece,” Moelle says. “You can see the album like a new single being separated into lots of small episodes.”
 
Approaching the album, Digitalism scrutinized Idealism’s tracklist and gleaned clues about sequencing the album based on crowd reactions during their live performances. Interludes buffer major mood shifts and vocal-driven rockers temper the body of work to facilitate the feeling of move- ment throughout the record’s episodes: When Digitalism says you’ll end up in space by the album-closing “Echoes,” it truly feels like you’re floating around in a weightless abyss.
    
“[Idealism] is like a movie,” Moelle says. “We had in mind a journey of what Digitalism is experiencing from beginning to the end, ending up in space somewhere, making a stop in Cairo, dealing with some problems like being on the road, missing some people and the typical ideas of friendship, love and food.”
     
But the group also has a grander intention. Think of Idealism as an aural PSA for getting off the couch and doing something with your life.  
    
“I know so many people who don’t actually do what they want to do, and this is why they’re not really happy,” Moelle says. “They don’t do anything against it. If [our record] can grab people by some emotional riff or melody, maybe we can encourage them to get their asses up.”