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‘French laptop trio DAT politics have double-clicked "the party" icon on their desktops and the results make for absurd, infectious fun.(…) even a beardy old grouch like me can't help but be seduced. (…)’

THE WIRE (UK)

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‘Wow! Twist ! Indeed! Then Smile from ear to ear at some of the most
gleefully deranged pop music i'll ever experience.
DAT politics are a trio of Gallic laptop poppers that sound like Bis covering Kraftwerk
on helium after listening to eight hours of bonkers J-Pop, Kinda, Beautiffully! Absurdly! Brilliant!’

ROCKSOUND (UK)

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‘in terms of songwriting, they play it straight, and ultimately demonstrate a knack for memorable tunes(…)
they bop around and shout and let the playful sense of fun take over completely.”

PITCHFORK (USA)

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‘Wow Twist plays Queen Bee – sexy from the get-go, all surface.’

DUSTED (USA)

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‘A more poppy and energetic but still addictive cd from the french trio.’

GAFFA (DK)

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‘Sounds lile ba egdegy and sharp electronic indierock version of Pixies (…)a lot of fantastic pseudo hits.’

GEIGER (DK)

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‘Wow Twist and I swear to you it is one of the most insanely odd and FUN records I've listened to…’

WATERPROOF (USA)

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‘Wow twist features very energetic comedy pop/punk-electronica. In the same time very catchy and accessible as weird and ingenious. This album rocks in the true sense of the word!’

ANALOG PLEASURES (USA)

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‘the French laptop trio DAT Politics reimagine punk rock as music created by and for hyperactive small children.’

ASSOCIATED PRESS (USA)

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‘French laptop art-pop trio DAT Politics have certainly carved out a distinctively eccentric presence in the leftfield electronic music sphere, with a prolific work ethic which has seen them release six albums in as many years of existence as a band. This album sees them turning their sound more towards melodic electro pop songs than ever before, whilst also drawing upon the sorts of hyperactive energy levels generated by their live show.
‘Wow Twist’ is an excellent sixth album from DAT Politics that shows them adeptly shifting their emphasis towards melodic electro power-pop, and indeed while there are many moments here that seem like they simply shouldn’t work in theory, it’s this fearsome grasp of catchy pop hooks that holds it all together beautifully (and much more effectively for example than their label heads’ recent ‘Press The Space Bar’ full-length).
Perhaps their best full-length to date.’

IN THE MIX (AUS)

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‘The songs are tuneful over-the-top rock and roll electronic tracks set up to disorientate.
Wow Twist is a good record from a band that must be great live. They could easily reproduce their sound live, and the high energy feel of the record would translate well to a club.’

GULLBUY (USA)

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‘Manic, glitchy, comically harsh, and musically quick-witted, this is the new face of art-rock.’

MUZE TM (USA)

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‘DAT Politics fuse the playfulness of Atari 2600's "Pitfall" video game music with the electronic experimentation of Pita, Mouse on Mars, and Oval. Jump into their twisted world.’

EPITONIC (USA)

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‘DAT politics Upload the brain universe that compressed the acidHUMANIX infectious disease of a Chemical=anthropoid to biocapturism corpse Feti=streaming circuit of this abolition world’

KENJI SIRATORI (USA)

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(...) Un groupe français qui plus est qui dégage sur scène comme sur disque, une énergie intacte et des idée fraîches( …) cette épopée sonique, aussi brève qu’intense, réserve surtout d’innombrables trésors de pop dézinguée.

LIBERATION (FR)

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Très proches de ses prestations live, DAT politics sort tout simplement son meilleur disque original et réussi.’

CODA (FR)

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‘Wow Twist, titre idéal pour cette collection de chansonnettes electro-punk distille un même climat d’euphorie puérile sur fond de sonorités façons jeux video préhistorique de gimmicks ludiques et d’harmonies bas de gamme (…) leur comptines en-têtante et leur énergie communicative font de cet album l’un des meilleurs du groupe Lillois.’

TRAX (FR)

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DAT Politics -GO PETS GO -PRESS KIT 2005:




Bottom Lounge, Chicago 05/16/05

DAT politics began its performance hurriedly, rushing the stage and firing up its equipment all within the space of about 10 seconds, creating a raucous immediacy of weird beats and baby synths. To my astonishment, the trio seemed to play and sing almost everything live, save the most intricate percussion sequences. Even then, a set of electronic drum pads was utilized to trigger various sounds, accompanying a menagerie of anonymous beeping boxes, voice processors, and an Oxygen 8 keyboard on a neck trap. Hnds were always moving, activating, or tweaking or twistung, keeping the relentless pace, moving from booty house to breaks to techno- there were even sings-alongs. Though the music was obviously yesterday's news to the group, the whole stuttering spectacle looked and sounded so strange, making DAT politics my new favorite laptop performers after lithops.

GROOVE (USA)

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DAT politics 'Go pets Go'

Things have fallen together nicely on the fifth album from the Northern France's top binary coded popsters. Although based in the serious party town of Lille, the last stop on eurostar before you hit Brussels, DAT politics have spent the past two years touring intensively, and it shows in the scattered coherence and neatly warped asides contained within this short, sharp and entirely purposeful collection. Not only does the tighness commonly fostered by constant performance show through in the new material, clearly discernible in the looped, rhythmic delivery of 'trick' and 'this way', but there's also a growing international feel to it, with tracks recorded in Berlin and Tokyo.There are contributions also from the digital folkies Nathan Michel and Kristin Erickson, whose banjo interruptions help to keep the cheery cynicism of 'no fairytale', with its shapeshifted voices disclaiming imbecilic platitudes, properly grounded.
As styles and sonic densities continue to slip and collide throughout, with shards of noise and emotive vocals bouncing off each other in an erratically controlled state of chaos, it's hard not to be impressed by how well DAT politics leep a handle on the proceedings. Don't be fooled by the fuzzy faux-naive nature of the presentation-there are severe strategies hard at work beneath the synthetic dayglo surface of each song. Too often these days the merely quirky gets passed off a the truly daring. That's not the case here. The simpleminded allure of the instrumentals 'Cat Polk' and ' Micro Rainbow' indicates a firm structural foundation to some of their wilder formal deviations, such as teh bipolar spoken credits on the final track. It takes quite a few trials and even some errors to create something as rich and original as this.

THE WIRE (UK)

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INDEX MAGAZINE
DAT Politics, 2003
Interviewed by Momus . Photograped by Elke Hesser

Dat Politics bring a sense of fun to the clicks, beeps, and cuts of glitch pop. Claude, Gaetan, and Vincent may be based in the industrial northern French town of Lille, but their sound marks the mood of the European post-electronic age. Recently Gaetan and Claude crossed paths with avant-pop songster Momus in Paris. Momus films the discussion at a mutual friend's apartment in the bastille quarter. vincent was at home taking care of business in Lille.

MOMUS: For DAT Politics, the laptop is a musical instrument.
GAËTAN: The laptop is going to be as important in the history of music as the guitar. DAT Politics was conceived as a totally laptop-based project. The first time we played live with the three-laptop line-up, someone came up to us at the end and said, "Why don't you just press play and then leave the stage?" MOMUS: But things can go wrong. And there's improvisation.
CLAUDE: When we play live, there's a lot that can go wrong. We each play on a different computer, so there are three different sources being combined. We don't use MIDI — Musical Instrument Digital Interface — so we have to keep in time with each other. If something goes wrong, we have to improvise and catch up. Sometimes, to keep it off balance, we'll put a song we don't usually play into the set, maybe a cover, like a hardcore version of "Video Killed the Radio Star." We like to mess around, mix things up, do something savage.
MOMUS: Some of your music reminds me of the schizophrenic surrealism which seems native to Belgium — Red Nose parades, Ensor paintings, that kind of stuff. I also hear it in groups like your Belgian friends Scratch Pet Land.
CLAUDE: Any schizo stuff probably happens because we're three people who have different ideas, moods, and personalities. But we're trying to bind them together into one project, one piece of music, and one design.
MOMUS: I think you integrate it all together pretty well. But there's still a channel-surfing playfulness that sets you apart. Were you video gamers as children?
GAËTAN: We played electronic games like everyone else, but none of us were console collectors or anything. We've been told that we're very jumpy and impatient musicians. People hear a bit we're playing and say, "That should last longer!" But we've already moved on to the next idea.
MOMUS: I saw some American reviews which, even though they were positive, said that your sound could be a bit irritating at times. American culture is very fast moving, so it's funny that American critics would be uncomfortable with your speed.
CLAUDE: We like to create frenetic rhythms. That's why we get on so well with someone like Kid 606, who layers samples over beats in a pretty hectic way.
MOMUS: Maybe musicians in smaller towns make frenetic music because small-town life is slow-paced. You live in Lille — that's a pretty small town.
GAËTAN: It is very calm in Lille — way too calm! But we're not originally from Lille. We come from the Champagne region about two hundred kilometers to the east. We moved to Lille for college. Living there, you have lots of time and no distractions.
MOMUS: And really low rents.
CLAUDE: That's true! And in France, there's a government program that subsidizes musicians. We can live comfortably without working.
MOMUS: Although you live in France, you seem closer to the Berlin scene than the Paris scene. The band Chicks on Speed, who are based in Berlin, put out your last album on their eponymous label.
GAËTAN: We do have some friends in Berlin. We also feel close to groups like Goodie Pal in London, and A Musik in Cologne.
MOMUS: You've recently started your own small label, Ski-pp.
CLAUDE: Yes, and it's taking up all our time right now. In January we released an album by Felix Kubin, which he made when he was in his teens in Hamburg, using cassette tapes and synths. Now we're working on a Ski-pp compilation.
MOMUS: I love that Kubin album. It's like the great missing Neue Deutsche Welle album, but sung by a boy whose voice hasn't broken yet. What's the music-making process like for the three of you?
GAËTAN : We meet up every day and play what we've been individually working on. Sometimes we mix two totally unrelated tracks, and then one of us records a keyboard part, someone does a vocal line, and someone chooses sounds. Finally, all three of us sit down in front of one computer and do post-production together.
MOMUS: Can we do an anatomy of a song, for instance "Pass Our Class?" It starts with the voice reading a very bureaucratic-sounding letter...
CLAUDE: Yes, that's Matmos, the experimental electronic duo from San Francisco. It's a real letter they received.
MOMUS: How did they end up on the album?
CLAUDE: We met them in San Francisco in 2000. Then we kept running into them in Europe, playing the same festival circuit. They came to Lille when they were touring with Björk, we all had lunch and everybody got drunk in the middle of the afternoon, and we proposed a collaboration. It was like a little holiday from touring for them. We gave them the main melody, and they adapted the text to fit.
MOMUS: The way the music is structured is really sophisticated and unpredictable — there are lots of transitions at the beginning, with cross-fades and granulation, which create a kind of sound grain or sound dust.
GAËTAN : We can't really re-create that delicate editing when we play live, so in concert, it's a lot more raw.
MOMUS: Are there any politics in DAT Politics?
CLAUDE: We don't consciously put social commentary in our music, but there is a spirit of autonomy and community. Often we seem to be losing ourselves in a kind of parallel universe of music Ñ record sleeves, concerts, funny images, and art. We've built this highly specific world around ourselves as a fortress against the regular world. Maybe one day we'll do a project which is more political...
MOMUS: You could call it Politics Politics! But the act of building a parallel universe is political in itself — it gives people a glimpse of formal possibilities that might one day become social possibilities. I sound like an aesthetics professor now, so let's change the subject. What about DAT, Digital Audio Tape? It's a forgotten digital technology, a kind of lost utopia. The idea of nostalgia for the digital is funny. Nostalgia is usually the province of guitar bands, while computer bands gaze boldly into the future. Are you optimistic about the future?
CLAUDE: Not really!
MOMUS: But the music sounds optimistic, childlike, playful.
CLAUDE: That could be optimism, or it could be seen as a wishful regression to childhood.
MOMUS: How do you want your sound to develop in the future?
CLAUDE: We just did a track called ÒBubble QueenÓ that included some singing, for Mille Plateaux's compilation Clicks and Cuts 3. We're really pleased with it. The people at Mille Plateaux want to move things more in the direction of digital pop and digital R&B. That's the place our stuff is going towards too. Our last album, Plugs Plus, was a move in that direction.
MOMUS: My new album adds a sprayed-on layer of glitch textures to fairly classical song structures. But I have the impression that you're moving back from a songless digital frontier while I'm starting to move towards that. You start with jams, then build up more and more complex structures by juxtaposing or deforming parts until distinct sections start emerging.
CLAUDE: Yeah, we don't use the standard verse-chorus structure. We do things our own way, maybe because we actually don't know how to write songs! No bridges, no signaled solos. If we do put a solo in, it's an accident.
MOMUS: What would I find if I came and rummaged through your record collections? Gainsbourg? Bowie?
GAËTAN : Bowie, yes. No French chanson, though. We always refer back to the music that has touched us. The classics for us are people like Lou Reed and John Cale. Michael Jackson's Thriller was the first record Claude bought! That's all part of our background, and it might jump out at any time.
MOMUS: Philip Sherburne, the American critic who wrote the sleeve notes for Clicks and Cuts 2, had a conversation with Taylor Dupree, the minimal electronica musician, who said it was just a question of time before an artist like Björk or Madonna put out a glitch pop record. If someone like that approached you to produce them, what would you do?
GAËTAN : If they could take the music as it is, fine. But it doesn't usually happen that way. Even the collaboration between Björk and Matmos on Vespertine didn't work like that, unfortunately. It would be great if more people came around to this deconstructed type of music, but we don't want to have to put it through a filter in order to reach MTV or the radio. We appreciate the difference between the electronica that reaches a big public and the electronica that stays underground. It may be starting to change now — tastes change, but who knows how long it's going to take?

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