Inside outbound

>> Prolific German duo Digitalism,
three sheets to the wind and setting sail

BIG BANGARANG THEORY: Bonjay

By JACK OATMON

“They were playing dirty hip hop, and we were drinking a couple of whiskeys,” recounts Jens Moelle of a visit to classic Montreal college dive Jupiter Room on December 30, 2005. “But this name was just so fascinating and after we left Montreal, it had quite an impact on us. It was one of our first trips overseas, the people were all really nice and the party was amazing. And the name ‘Jupiter Room’ reminded us of this abstract 2001: A Space Odyssey white room. It was so cool that we kept the name.”

The booze and the bar begot the track title, the tune transformed into a theme and, as Moelle explains, the emotional thread of Digitalism’s early voyages was sewn through their entire debut album.

“It’s called Idealism, so it’s about ideas, which are something that you’re heading for or that you reach out for. Our music is about excitement, it’s very melodic and it’s got a kind of melancholic touch. And melancholy is quite romantic—being a bit sad but thinking of cool things that you really love or people that are not there. And it’s also something you’re trying to move towards, like ideas. So the album is about far, far places and discovering things through adventure.”

Therein lies the tether between the album’s grandiose, nebulous themes of space and travel. “Space is this unlimited resource of undiscovered things. If you’re thinking about space, you always have the big picture in your mind.”

Much like the thumping propulsion of the seamlessly woven disc, Moelle and Ismail Tüfekçi themselves are victim to the traveller’s itchy feet. Their unmistakable production style, which orbits around mounting cacophonies and waning sonic degradation, is partly attributed to this need to move forward.

“We’ve got one really old PC that runs the main sequencer and the power’s very limited. So we can’t use a lot of tracks at the same time. We always have to be a bit tricky, so it forces us to be quite creative. If you have to be clever, it’s a quick evolution, the same as in nature, for example. So we’ve learned a lot in a really short time and we’re very impatient. As soon as a song takes us more than one or two days to finish, we just get bored of it and do something else. So we produce very quickly and we don’t really care about hi-fi sound. Actually, that’s what we hate.”

Their restless expansion also applies to their constantly evolving live performance. Over the two years since they’ve last visited, they’ve gone from DJing to a small-scale laptop and sampling set-up, to their current incarnation, complete with live drums and guitar as well as a microphone for Moelle’s singing, all of which complement the digital arrangement.

“We just came back from Australia. We’re working on a new live show and we just finished it over there. We had to book studio time when we had a day off, just to check the tech stuff and the programming. But the first time we ever played that set was not in the studio because we didn’t have time to test it. It was at the Parklife Festival in front of 10,000 people.”

With Ghettonuns and DJ Cherry Cola at
Club Soda on Saturday, Oct. 13, 9 p.m., $20, all ages