In June 2016, Olsen and Patiño performed at the weekend festival Saturnalia at Milan’s Macao. Dressed in red, white, and blue track suits, they not only played from their respective computer / snare drum + effects set-ups—they also ran back and forth, did push-ups, and hopped around, making for an intersection between rave, fitness class, and marching band. It was an amazing performance. Right after the performance, Olsen and Patiño met with Guy Schwegler, Remo Bitzi, and David Huser of zweikommasieben and spoke about Tiësto’s 2004 Olympia performance in Athens, a potential Under Armour endorsement, Patiño’s appearance with Evol, and Olsen’s solo album Bass Drum! (13dB Records, 2014). In between, something resembling an interview took place. It went like this:
Guy Schwegler: Opening question—do you know any good jokes?
Rubén Patiño: Errrrm, we know a joke, yes… [Pause]
Morten J. Olsen: No…
Remo Bitzi: Ok, so we need a different opening question—do you have to exercise a lot to be able to do your performance? Or are the performances the only exercise you do?
MJO: Well, you could put it this way—the reason we do the performances is to get in shape.
RP: Yeah, the more gigs we get, the fitter we are.
RB: So if you get really popular you’ll get in really good shape.
RP: Yeah, we’d have six packs.
RB: So you’re not there yet?
RP: No, no.
GS: Well, we wanted to talk about humor—and here we go. Do you see humorous parts in your work?
MJO: Absolutely. But those parts are quite serious.
RP: It’s commentary, really.
MJO: I suppose that’s what we’re trying to balance. I mean we’re not trying to make fun of other people directly. But we are making fun of ourselves and we are trying to not take ourselves too seriously. But at the same time we want to—ideally—produce magnificent sound.
RP: Humor is a different layer; because we are doing fucking tight music. So we want to balance those parts—that’s our main concern.
MJO: At the same time we try to remove ourselves and look at those things from the outside. So we came to realize that there were actually quite a few humorous points to it and that maybe we could enhance those points or highlight them in a certain way. Like stupid things that we do and that we incorporate in the music. Maybe the athletic parts, which are very simple references to primary school—these games you play or have to play when you grow up. Some people refer to that in a humorous way, they think it’s funny. But at the time it actually was quite serious.
MJO: I mean, when performing or just playing on a big PA in front of people, there’s a very fine line between something that you take into serious consideration and something that becomes ridiculous. Sometimes it becomes theater—it’s not even good, it’s just theater. That’s what we are playing with. We ask ourselves where is this line? And can we move it a little bit, pull it back and forth? In a way, we ridicule ourselves.
RB The “thing” you’re talking about is clubs, right? So that’s what you’d usually get booked for?
RP: Actually, it depends on the country. In Spain we’ve played auditoriums [chuckles] because they don’t see our performance as a club intermezzo.
MJO: I think the context we’d want to be in is where you would go to a club, the night unfolds, and we’d be some sort of a break. But club nights usually go into a very steady zone in which things never change.
RP: We conceived our performance as a 3 a.m. type of show. When we play at 10 p.m., we’re just the experimental opening act…but you know what happens? People say “if we had known, we would have booked you for 3 a.m.”.
MJO: We’d want to be the thing after which people are like, “What just happened? That didn’t fit!” That’s the ideal situation. Because people usually get really excited and they get new energy and then it gets really fresh. But very few people dare to put us in that situation, unfortunately…
RB: That’s never happened?
MJO: Only a few times.
RB: How did it work?
RP: We played twice in Moscow and we were raving and the people really liked it. Yeah.
RB: Have people from the audience ever joined you in exercising?
RP: Yes, and that’s interesting because there’s always a macho part—we were playing in Bucharest, for example, and there was this guy who was doing push-ups with us. But of course he did three times more [laughs]. At least he joined—we triggered that.
RB: You have any idea why and how you trigger things like that?
MJO: Maybe because we usually are off-stage, in the middle of the people, I guess there is also some physicality, some movement, that is pretty different from someone being up on stage—like one person doing machines. You get a different distance. Also, the acoustic part we integrate can trigger something—maybe because it has some kind of directness.
GS: Speaking of that acoustic part, and maybe this is a bold statement—in the context of electronic music, live drummers are mostly shit. [Laughter]
GS: …or at least they’re pretty out of place.
RP: Yeah, but Morten is a drum machine.
GS: Ok. But still he’s a drummer.
MJO: I guess…
GS: So, with what kind of mindset do you approach the project?
MJO: Maybe the idea as such would be to integrate an acoustic element in electronic music. That’s what we try to do, basically. I mean, the key is—again—to balance it somehow. It’s interesting because, for example, we often struggle with PAs. Usually in a small club you find an OK system that sounds good when a DJ plays a well-mastered record. But as soon as you add an acoustic instrument, you need different amplification. That’s a technical aspect that’s not talked about much yet. Furthermore, there’s this notion that when you have a machine, you tend to humanize it or try to make it sound more human—dirtier, more dynamic. You try to make the sound change more often, microscopically. And I try to do the opposite. But even if I play a hi-hat really straight, there still would be tiny variations—it’s still quite human. That’s what I’m thinking about when we try to do a piece.
RP: His playing is as strict, as tight, as un-loose as possible; machine-like…
MJO: Yeah, yeah. I’m trying to be more like a machine, but obviously I fail. That’s actually where we find the sound—somewhere in between.
RB: I can relate to that “as strict as possible” mantra a lot.
MJO: Yeah, but the thing is that the reality is not strict at all. But it’s still as strict as possible.
RB: I like it because this “…as possible” always bears the notion of a trade-off. When I saw you play before I very much had a grid in mind—everything made a lot of sense, like this 1-0-1-0-thing. It was perfect. At the same time, it was stupid.
GS: [Laughs]
RB: This was meant as a compliment. The sequences of the performance are kind of obvious—after a while you get it. On the other hand, the combination of elements you’re putting on top of each other—rave, computer music, live drumming, sports—is rather surprising.
MJO: Yeah, maybe we’re juxtaposing seemingly randomly picked reference points—military drumming, Mississippi Delta blues…
RP: Here we go! We often use YouTube.
MJO: Yeah, what do we call it? … YouTube anthropology. And then maybe we put two things on top of each other that normally wouldn’t make any sense. Maybe we take a military way of playing drums from a country that invaded another one and then take some of their folk music and put these things together and see what happens.
RB: And what’s your approach from a compositional point of view?
RP: It’s all pattern-based, it’s all rhythms. Of course we decide on a rhythm and then Morten finds some sounds—he does hi-hats, sometimes combined with white noise. And yeah, sometimes he tries to sound a bit more like an 808.
RB: What’s the starting point—is it the sound, the references, the performance? Or the outfits?
RP: It’s a sequence of things really—like different layers. We started doing sound; that was the origin. But since we have a program that runs tasks by itself, I don’t have to be in front of the computer all the time, so we started to think about adding something. The performance of the guy in front of the computer can be more physical than the performance of the drummer. Yet the drummer creates sound by executing a physical movement—hitting the snare. So the person who isn’t drumming isn’t doing sound but still can move and generate something…
MJO: That’s another thing that is going against itself—as a drummer I would make a physical movement and that would create sound. But with the computer somehow the opposite happens—it makes a sound and that sound makes you move.
GS: Yeah, that’s weird. But it’s really good. Another thing…
RB: Sorry, just a question in between—has a joke come to mind in the meantime?
MJO, RP: [Shake their heads]
RB: Ok, then go on!
GS: Another thing we wondered about is the different aliases you use. One way of reading this is that tradition of Detroit techno—you know, wearing masks, downplaying ego, etc. But in your case, is there something else behind it?
RP: I know that it could be interpreted as us hiding identity. But no, no, it’s just that it took us a long time to find a name that we liked. But we didn’t like it, really. It was “untitled pattern parade” in Norwegian. [Addressing MJO] Can you say that?
MJO: [Mumbles in Norwegian]
RP: Ok, so it was kind of hard to pronounce, like, you know—a long word. So we started to change it—also because what we were doing wasn’t untitled anymore either. So then we started to change the name all the time and were like, “this is part of the thing”. We just kept the initial letters of the words, the rest is always changing.
RB: Changing the name constantly is confusing—have you ever encountered problems with people you worked with?
MJO: …the people thought that our name referred to the venue. It was “Naturkunde Museum Ostbayern” and people were writing to the organizer asking where the show was “is it really in Ostbayern?”
RP: Yeah, that was a good name.
MJO: The promoter told us that we shouldn’t call ourselves something that refers to an actual place. But maybe that’s part of the humor aspect again.
RB: Do you have any idea until what point you’ll be pushing this not-being-part-of-the-industry thing?
MJO: But we are part of the industry.
RB: Yeah, but you try to not be.
RP: Well, I don’t see the difference between underground and mainstream. I think it is the same.
RB: Yeah, I would agree.
RP: I think it’s no longer “more real” to play in front of twenty people with shitty sound, shitty conditions. I’d like to play on huge systems. To play on a huge system normally is to play at a festival or a more mainstream event—even with some drink sponsor behind your back.
RB: That’s alright?
RP: It’s not ideal. I’d prefer not to, you know.
RB: So you’d be up for that but at the same time there’s this rejectionist attitude…
RP: I think things are so conservative and people are so afraid of doing stuff, so that if you are doing a minor little game, it seems like “oh you guys are sick, you are crazy”. But I don’t see that. I think it’s obvious. I don’t think we are super crazy, sick, alternative, fucked-up on stage, you know. We just try to put the focus somewhere else.
MJO: But we are anarchists.
RB: You are anarchists?
RP: No, no, I’m not.
RB: That’s confusing.
MJO: I’m a bit cynical.
RP: Dadaist.
GS: What about the labels you’re releasing your music on? How did you choose them? Or did they chose you?
RP: We never asked anyone, they asked us. And they just liked our music; that’s why they asked.
GS: Were you aiming at releasing the music from the beginning? Or was it more about the performance?
RP: The performance came first but then the performance was pushed into the club field, and if you play in clubs you need to release records. And we just did what’s supposed to be done in that field.
MJO: No, but it wasn’t supposed to be a project that was about producing tracks. That wasn’t the idea. The idea was much more to do performances and maybe sort of demonstrations, or to go through catalogues. That was what we thought we’d be doing—really short segments that we demonstrate, like, ‘this is a known pattern in that culture’, and then play this for one minute.
RP: Yeah, more in an anthropological way.
MJO: But in an art context, I guess. But then, somehow… [Laughter]
GS: Are you happy with the releases? Do you think they reflect what you are doing?
RP: I think it’s difficult to record something that’s multimedia. Sound is only one layer in our work. When you do a record it’s only sound. The visual aspect gets lost. Although we do care a lot about the design and everything, but still, the design isn’t in motion.
RB: So you’re happy with it?
RP: Yeah, I think it’s pretty good. [Addressing MJO] Right?
MJO: Yeah, I think it’s worth… some… attention. So I guess that’s good.
MJO: Oh, a joke…so a bear walked into a bar. You know that one? He was ordering a “gin… tonic”. And then the bartender goes “What’s with the big pause?” And the bear—looking at his paws—goes: “What do you mean? I always had them.”