by LORRAINE CARPENTER

“We are a band that doesn’t go in the studio,” says Franz Schütte. “We are a band that is the studio.”

If you’re picturing plastic-coated machine men with disc drives for mouths, keyboards for backs and knobs for, um, knobs, I hate to shatter your Kraftwerkian illusions, but Germany’s Jeans Team are made of flesh and blood. Schütte and Reimo Herfort founded the band a decade ago, and were joined two years later by Henning Watkinson and Gunther Kreis. In North America, where they’re about to make their live debut at MEG Montreal, Jeans Team are probably best known for 2000’s “Keine Melodien” (“EINS, ZWEI, DREI, VIER!”), a song that was covered by Peaches and became a club cut in its own right.

While the band’s minimal electro pop and synth rock anthems have remained consistent, they’ve undergone many changes in recent years. Their long relationship with Berlin’s Kitty-Yo, the label behind the likes of Peaches, Gonzales and Louie Austen, came to an end last year when its founders, Raik Hölzel and Patrick Wagner, parted ways. “Kitty-Yo changed quite a lot at that time,” says Schütte, explaining that relations became strained when the band hesitated to renew their contract. “We didn’t feel so much at home anymore.” Hölzel still runs Kitty-Yo solo while Wagner has co-founded Louisville Records, the label that released Jeans Team’s latest album, Music Von Oben.

The quartet has also ascended the tech ladder over the years, graduating from the VHS format to new-fangled compact discs, from four-track tape recordings to digital, largely in the confines of their custom-created studio, Nadel Eins.

“I believe in being my own master in my own studio,” states Schütte. “If you go somewhere for two weeks and record an album, it’s like an appointment and you have to be at your maximum, but sometimes we are just not. I believe in taking time to try things out. Most producing processes nowadays are just, ‘Do it now, do it fast,’ and at the end it’s just shit but somehow it’s okay, the job is done, and I don’t like it. It’s not good.”

Although the artistic process can function at a more leisurely pace than repetitive manual labour–and Schütte admits it usually does, given the freedom they have to tinker in their studio–he draws a parallel between music work and factory work, a juxtaposition presented in their latest video, “Oh Bauer.”

“Just because the one thing can maybe be done faster or in a more rhythmic movement, doesn’t mean that it’s not the same,” he says. “It’s a little bit more [about] how you feel. When we’re in the studio, we are all working so we are feeling like workers.”

For those who still have Kraftwerk on the brain, Schütte explains that “Oh Bauer” is a song that glorifies the simple life and natural work of farmers, not the first image that comes to mind when one hears urban electro music.

“It’s nearly a religious thing,” he explains. “It’s the idea of the farmer out in the country, in the sun. We just wanted to have this romantic view, this heroism of work.”

With Tiga, rinôçérôse, Panico and Rory Philips at Metropolis on Saturday, Oct. 22, 8 p.m., $25

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