Shot of Ambition

Datarock rises above its hometown inspirations and creates music that’s worth experiencing

Datarock isn’t a band you just listen to. From its signature blacked-out sunglasses and bright red hooded track suits to its energy on stage, the small town Norwegian band brings its own brand of rock across the Atlantic from what once was a metal-dominated scene.

In 2000, Datarock formed as a trio that grew to a foursome before dwindling down to its core members, Fredrik Saroea and Kjetil Møster, who carried on the project to greater heights. Datarock’s debut album Datarock Datarock (2005) was released on the band’s own label YAP (Young Aspiring Professionals) and distributed to 10 countries. Famed track “Fa-Fa-Fa” was picked up by Coca-Cola for an advert and was also featured in Ace Ventura Jr: Pet Detective, NHL 08, FIFA 08, NBA Live 08 and The Sims 2: Free Time. “Fa-Fa-Fa” also appeared in an Apple fourth generation iPod Nano ad, which showed the cover art for Datarock Datarock and the song playing on an orange Nano. The band hit top 100 lists including Australia’s Triple J Hottest 100 and Rolling Stone’s 100 Best Songs of 2007, and went on to be featured in a number of television shows and video game soundtracks.

Now with five notable releases under its belt, Datarock moves on with bigger and better plans. We sat down with Saroea and Møster during Datarock’s most recent tour to discuss Norway, the red track suits, cannabis and more.

There’s been a lot of talk around New York this week about Datarock’s live shows. Can you tell us what to expect at a Datarock performance?

SAROEA: For the first year people were surprised that we weren’t just two people with laptops. Because you say, “Datarock” and a lot of people just go, “Oh, whatever—an electronic act that I don’t know. I don’t want to see them live.” But our show isn’t like that at all . . .

MØSTER: There’s a lot of interaction.

SAROEA: Ever since we started the band, we’ve been mostly inspired by hardcore bands like thrash metal bands and punk rock bands that had that kind of energy. So, we tried to incorporate dance music and electronic shows with that kind of energy, the crowd participation, the whole thing. Every time we can we end up crowd surfing and jumping into the audience . . . We try to merge the hardcore attitude with an electronic dance show. Our drummer [Tarjei Strøm is] basically a metal drummer. And the bass player [Thomas Larssen has] travelled 28 countries playing with punk rock and hardcore bands. And of course we also have [Møster’s] saxophone getting a little bit into jazz.

Because we have the red track suits and dance rhythms, we can get away with anything. If you listen to our full body of work it’s so varied. Some people who’ve only heard one or two songs they come to the show and they’re super surprised because the show is really different from what they’re expecting . . . We even have tribute songs to people like The Fall, it’s a British band from the ’70s and [to] this guy called Scott Walker who is more of a crooner. Nobody seems to care because we have those red track suits and we can do whatever we want.

Where did the track suits come from?

SAROEA: We’re from a city called Bergen, Norway. The other bands in Bergen who had international careers at the time were black metal bands. And the way black metal bands looked with their corpse make up and their weird clothes—they don’t look like that when they go to work programming for whatever oil company. By the time we started, we were already in a culture where it was okay to dress up . . . The track suits are sort of meant to fill the gap between us and our inspirations. Because there is a gap between time and space of course, between Devo in the ’70s and Datarock in 2011. But the main thing and inspirations were Devo and they were Talking Heads, where it was okay to go beyond just music and perhaps we can build a whole image . . . We’re not singing about sad stuff that happened in our childhood, we’re trying to entertain people so it’s okay to not get too personal. And in that case, it’s nice to have a kind of stage persona and the track suits help you get there.

MØSTER: The track suits sort of show people that we don’t take ourselves very seriously because they don’t look super fancy at all—they look stupid. [Laughs] I think people let down their guards when they see us performing. They just have fun and relax and see the humor it in. And we look a lot stupider than they do.

SAROEA: I also think there’s something that happens. For instance our drummer, he’s a spectacular drummer. You have to be deaf not to pick it up; he’s a ridiculously good drummer. Sometimes when you see something that’s really impressive you’re like, “Well, I’m not sure.” But when the guy has funny glasses and a funny track suit on, and as long as you’re having fun, then it’s more like, “Oh, I wanna be his buddy; I like that guy.” Same thing with Kjetil, I mean he’s a ridiculous sax player. When you see a big guy playing a saxophone you’re like, “He’s so good. He’s probably going to sleep with my girlfriend.” [Laughs] But if you have a guy wearing a track suit having fun, as he said, it lowers the shoulders of everyone and they let themselves have fun. They look at someone who’s having fun on stage and they have fun. And when we do shows we actually have people show up in our suits.

Have you played for kids before?

SAROEA: It’s the first show like that. It was something called Kidrockers [kidrockers.com]. These super cool guys put it together—cool shows during the daytime for kids. And you can only get in if you’re with a kid. And they got a lot of cool acts to do it. It’s funny because the way I sing on stage I’m usually screaming, but in front of kids I just couldn’t do it. I was afraid they were just going to start crying.

MØSTER: At the end we got all of them on stage. We have this thing where we make them jump like at our shows. But they were just standing there jumping super fast up and down through the whole song.

So, what else are you guys doing?

SAROEA: We have a new song called “California.” The California EP is already out. There [are] five songs from the forthcoming project we’re doing: It’s called Datarock the Musical. It’s basically a new album and enables us to do a little bit of a new show. It’ll have a storyline. It’ll also be a kind of show that if a student theater group, amateur theater group or even a professional theater group wants to put it up, we can provide them with the material they’ll need to put on the musical. So, hopefully it’ll be presented somewhere as a professional production. But the ambition is to make it into a film, and that [it] looks like it’s happening.

It’s going to be funny. The ambition is to create the worst musical ever and it’s going to be so hard because the world’s worst musical has been written over and over again. So, in the process of trying to write the worst musical ever, we might come up with a mediocre one. It’s going to be a funny presentation of an exaggerated version of Datarock’s story, which is: Four friends starting a band called Datarock in Bergen, Norway, taking inspirations from bands like Devo and taking it on the road in America. Basically you follow this group of friends on a road trip on their tour from the East Coast to the West Coast. And by the time they hit Los Angeles, they make it big. It’s exaggerated. By that time they have such humongous success, and then what happens on the way and how they cope with that.

So, the California EP is from that. We released California EP in the middle of the tour. We’re releasing another EP and another EP and an album. And the bass player of Devo—the guy who did all the Devo videos in the old days, like “Whip It”—he made those videos and now he is putting his final touches on the new Datarock video called “California,” and it’s shot all over California.

Colorado and other states have a strong medical marijuana culture. Do you have any opinions on legalization?

MØSTER: I think that legalizing everything—that can be problematic. But for marijuana I think that can be beneficial and developing . . . I want to legalize it. For one thing it should not be associated with other harder drugs. I also think that they should stop criminalizing people smoking. It’s pretty stupid because there’s nothing wrong with it . . . I think it’s like if people were grown up enough to figure these things out for themselves like, “I just can’t smoke because I’m going to be depressed or a little bit mental if I do, so I don’t do it.” But I mean a lot of people do amazing stuff when they smoke and they get really creative. In a sociological way, I would say I’m pro legalization, but I’m just worried that a lot of people will have problems with it.

SAROEA: . . . I have a feeling that one of the reasons why this kind of stuff isn’t too popular in the bureaucratic system is because it isn’t taxed like normal commercial commodities . . . So like Kjetil said, yeah, we wish we could just say, “Yeah, legalize it.”

www.datarockmusic.com.

Dressed for Success

Datarock’s red jumpsuits are about as distinctive as, well, Devo’s flowerpot hats. But the signature threads came about pretty circumstantially, as the band explained during a 2007 Format Magazine interview: “We happened to know these guys that ran this Norwegian snowboard company called White Out. So for the [“Fa Fa Fa”] video we asked them if we could have 40 track suits so everyone could look the same, because everyone was supposed to be Datarock partying in Norway. Because of that, we used the track suits for press photos and then we started using them live.”