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DAT POLITICS: Sous Hit (Digital Narcis)
RATING Dat Politics are a four-piece from Lille in northern France and 'Sous Hit' is
their third - and finest - album. Unless you've been feeding your hard-drive a
party cocktail of poppers, Ecstasy and vodka, chances are this amazing record
will be your unforgettable introduction to a compact world of spasmelodic
digital melody and crude, cute, crunchy, funny, fucked-up pop. Cows moo,
children scream: for Dat Politics, France's most thrilling new act, no sound
is sacred.
Please don't be put off by the name.There's nothing overtly political about Dat Politics.'It's like a game with words,'explains Claude Pailliot, 29, one quarter of this most extraordinary group of unassuming laptop-touting pop revolutionaries. 'Although, yesterday the postman asked me if i was doing some politics..'
And so, for the first time in recent memory, it transpires that the best new French band, a band who do for the portable computer what Kraftwerk did for its bulky domestic processor, hail not from Paris but from the historic industrial city of Lille, an easily escapable place starved of significant underground culture. Here, in the spacious living quarters of 28-year-old Vincent Thierion, Dat Politics have created their own digital world from the most basic technology. Lo-tech entrepreneurs extolling the myriad possibilities of home-production, Dat politics run a website (ski-pp.com) and a record label (skipp) as means of releasing their distinctive and original hypermelodic compositions. 'it's more like Do it Yourself' says Gaëtan Collet, 28, sipping a post-lunch Cognac, 'there are a lot of connections with the punk attitude. We don't have a lot of equipment, we make what we want to do with small things and it's Ok i think. For us it's perfect.'
Friends for ten years, the four (Emeric Aelters, 28, is the other member) originally moved from the Ardennes in the east to study at Lille University. They produced electro-acoustic music as Tone Rec, a 'serious and minimal' parallel project with three albums to its name currently on ice, but after two years realised that ' it is not really in touch with our personnalities' says Pailliot, 'so we say let's start something closer to us'
Dat Politics' fresh, cute sound caused an immediate sensation on the global avant-noise scene, here was a cebratory pop music performed on machine traditionnaly used for abstract drones. Live, too the group are atonishing -the most rock'n'roll non-rock band. Their third, latest and best album, 'Sous Hit', for high-brow Japanese imprint Digital Narcis, is a startling swirl of triumphant tunes and sparky, jittery genius. Its first nine 'tracks' are two-second screams. Cows are also involved.
' For us it's usual,' says Collet, 'but i can imagine for people it's strange and mutant.' Naturally, we wouldn't have it any other way.
PIERS MARTIN NME, March 2001
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Dat Politics - Sous-hit
Le collectif lillois jumeau de Tone Rec, initiative française parmi les plus excitantes dans le domaine des musiques électroniques exploratrices, continue son bonhomme de chemin, et nous offre son troisième opus en moins d'un an et demi. Force est de constater qu'il continue d'aller de l'avant, à une vitesse qui plus est vertigineuse.
Sous-hit, qui sort cette fois-ci sur Digital Narcis, label du Japonais Kojo Marutani (qui s'attache autant à rééditer le Seven Tons for Free de Pita qu'un inédit de Bernhard Günter...), voit en effet Dat Politics continuer à investir leur musique si particulière avec plus de brio, d'humour, de verve que jamais, en greffant à leurs divers affects de prédilection (glitches en tous genres, rythmiques binaires saturées, mélodies ultra-tonales déconstruites, voix familières déshumanisées à grands coups de rasoir digital) des effets et des boutades sonores inédites. Le ludique continue d'être la composante principale de l'art de Dat Politics : la musique électronique expérimentale la plus abstraite et l'electronica mélodique la plus débridée, voire une electro pop désincarnée qui aurait oublié d'être idiote et seulement référentielle. Ainsi, le disque commence avec neuf très courtes plages où un hurlement strident d'enfant est passé dans divers filtres le faisant muter en une séquence aiguè purement électronique, introduisant le pétaradant 10, où des nappes saturées et une mélodie entêtante se confondent avec une ligne de basse new-wave sautillante. Un vrai petit tube, en somme, et du très grand art de construction/déconstruction de pop post-digitale...
Sinon, Dat Politics fait toujours aussi bien groover ses rythmiques saturées (12), hurler ses mélodies les plus tendres, toujours influencées par le légendaire Plux Quba de Nuno Canavarro (http://www.ski-pp.com/spacer.gif), danser ses larsens digitaux sur une mélodie idiote (http://www.ski-pp.com/spacer.gif), chanter un chœur de peluches meurtrières (samplées sur la BO d'Akira ?) sur un tapis de crépitements glacés (http://www.ski-pp.com/spacer.gif)... A la fois plus pop et paradoxalement plus extrémiste que ses prédécesseurs, qui sortaient pourtant déjà largement du lot de l'internationale electronica, Sous-hit est sans contexte le disque le plus abouti de Dat Politics, qui après plusieurs productions remarquables sur des structures aussi prestigieuses que A-Musik en Allemagne, Fat Cat en Angleterre ou Tigerbeat6 aux USA, s'expatrie au Japon pour sortir ce qu'il convient tout simplement d'appeler un chef-d'œuvre. A découvrir impérativement.
Olivier Lamm
Chronicart.com
Mild-mannered multimedia grafix guerillas from Lille rapidly assemble another album of joyous, jubilant laptop pop. Machine explode with happiness! Hard drive yeld en masses! Glitch bores begoge. Dat Politics have seen the future and it's totally tuneful.!
Piers Martin.
The Face Mars 2001
Dat Politics
SOUS HIT
Digital Narcis DN 009 Cd
By david Keenan The Wire April 2001
Increasingly, laptop composition is the electro equivalent of jerk-off guitar. Interest in soul communication or even interesting sound declines in inverse proportion to increased focus on technological mastery - who's got the biggest bottom end, the deepest subsonic rumble ? It's getting to be as much fun as listening to someone programm software. Perhaps every new musical technology goes through a period of muscle flexing, where its parameters are pushed to breaking point and/or tedium, but it's now time to start treating technology with a bit less respect. Maybe then we can get on with transcending it.
DAT Politics are an inspiring case in point. A laptop quartet from France, they make their computers sound like toys. Although at times they're abreast of their contemporaries - the tactile squelch and computer game rhythms of Kid 606, the illuminated urban drama of To Rococo Rot and the childlike melodies of Schlammpeitziger - their aesthetic draws more from the stumbling cut and paste sound of the early Rough Trade punk 7''s. At points Sous Hit even sounds like Daniel Miller's late 70's imaginary synthpop group The Silicons Teens, but this gloriously infantile apprach to electronic noise goes right back to Neu ! and Michael Rother and Cluster's group Harmonia, who first set nursery rhythme patterns to blooping analogue synth.
Sous Hit with rapidfire bursts of electronic noise before trumbling in with the tinniest drum pattern and some tiny, galloping melodies.
Sustaines, beaming chords sound out a spedily ascending melody, like they were Morricone on helium. Yet, for all the wind-up toy dynamics, the set is oddly moving and despite its relentlessly upbeat facade, an ineffable poignacy inscribes the set.
claude pailliot dat politics/skipp
B.P 57
59003 Lille cedex France
skipp
www.ski-pp.com <http://www.ski-pp.com>
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