An interview with DAT Politics,
which I found here and translated:

Which are your first names?
Gaetan, Claude and Vincent.

How did you meet and how did it all begin?
We met at school in a small city in the east of France (They live in Lille). We started to make music together in the Nineties. We listened to lots of rock'n'roll, noise, experimental but also more abstract things, like stuff from Japan. We created DAT Politics in... 98.

Why have you chosen the Chicks On Speed label for Plugs Plus, your new album?
We were in contact with Chicks On Speed for other reasons. When they knew that we were DAT Politics they told us that they knew our albums for a long time and that they would like to do something with us. Just then we were recording the new album, so we proposed it to them. As they were very enthusiastic, it all happened quite simply.

When you create, do you have a well defined role or does everyone put in his grain of salt anywhere?
We all do more or less the same thing because we work with the same software. So each person composes at home and then we meet every day, when we have time, to exchange our points of view. Each has some small speciality, someone's more at ease with the melodies, the noises... but it's all left free, it's up to the imagination of each one.

On stage, you play with three computers. Which software do you use?
For the PC there's a program which is called Soundclub, it's a very small German software, which in the beginning was conceived to make music for video games.

It is a tracker?
More or less, it is a multiple kind of sampler, on which you can play with the pitch and volume of each sound, and on which you can also work with the stereo. It's pretty simple to use.

You have the same software on the three computers?
On the Mac we use Player Pro. It's different software, but it functions the same way. A kind of editor with patterns, on which you can add effects.

Between do Mac and PC... which do you prefer?
We all began with really cheap PCs and gradually we wanted to discover the Mac environment. For us, there aren't too many differences, you find good software on both. The software which we use for live work and in the studio is rather simple and we know them very well because we've been using them for a long time. We use some tricks too, like there's a program called Mousing (a basic emulation of the theremin which you play with the mouse) to make waves, variations etc, but our principal softwares remain Player Pro and Soundclub .

Even for the recording of the album?
Yes.

When you played live, I saw you playing with drum sticks which produced sounds when you struck the air. That adds a lot of life to the concert, I imagine that it's a toy?
That's a secret (laughter), it is untraceable and was modified to connect it to a mixer. For some time we'd been using it in the studio and we decided to take it along to the live show.

I also saw you frantically shaking a small apparatus, it was a sampler?
Yes, a SU10 of Yamaha.

Your set live is composed mainly of computers. Did any crash during the set?
That happens to us almost every time (laughter) even though this evening it was not the case. Yesterday, there was a problem for example. Even if one expects it, one is always surprised. But good, that adds danger to the live show!

Are the computers synchronized?
Not at all, there is no MIDI synch; everything is done by ear. It is thus extremely flexible and that leaves a great freedom.

With regard to your raw materials, what are your inspirations?
We record a little of all that we find sympathetic, but we use especially the bank of sounds of the software we use. We like them particularly because they have strong video game connotations. So it's a mixture between recorded acoustic sounds we've reprocessed, and ultra-simple synth sounds.

You leave a lot of space for improvisation in your live set. So each show is unique. I imagine that the album will be a little different, even if we find the same themes?
Yes, we try to re-play the pieces as we made them originally, but obviously we can't do exactly the same thing live, on the level of treatments and so on.And then in the studio, we do quite a lot of post-production. The pieces live are different, longer, we have fun with them.

What are you listening to at the moment?
At the moment we're on tour, so we hearing a lot of demos people are giving us. We haven't been buying CDs for a very long time, because there is no time for us to make it to the stores, it's a bit of a pity. But people give us demos which are sometimes very strange, we make many discoveries.

You like a label in particular?
We follow the activity of Mego, and Chicks On Speed Records who are on the same trip as us.

You've just put out Plugs Plus, what are your next projects?
After the tours, we're thinking of bringing out some thing on Chicks On Speed Records, probably a maxi, something a bit shorter anyway. We're concentrating especially on the next release on our Skipp label . We're putting out an album by Felix Kubin very soon, in June or July. It is a very particular album, because it's the first thing he ever made, when he was 15 years old; a project which really appeals to us.

When did you create your label?
About the same time as we made DAT Politics. Up to now there've been four releases. It's more a hobby, because for the moment we're concentrating on the group, but we try to release things regularly.

In connection with the creation and management of a label, did you encounter difficulties?
(laughter) Money! We release in small pressings, so very little money comes back to us each time. On the other hand, for the distribution and the diffusion we didn't really encounter problems, because we're now in a kind of circuit which we know well. There are relations a little bit everywhere, our albums are distributed internationally. It is the lack of money which makes us to wait a little before each release.

You are your only managers or other people work with you?
All three of us do that. That also goes for the design of the sleeves, the Web site, etc.

You make a living from it?
Yes! Only since last year.

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