THE S/T INTERVIEW: Hot Chip

It’s very jarring when you listen to it on the record. Do you have any favorite records that accomplish a similar thing?
Joe: If you look at old records like the White Album or Sign O the Times, they’re all over the place constantly. I guess the White Album is kind of a classic example of that because it’s the sound of four people trying to make music on their own and not doing things so much together.
Al: There’s the big ’80s massive albums, like [Dire Straits’] Brothers in Arms or Peter Gabriel’s So. Paul Simon and stuff like that. I suppose we had something really good mixed, and we wanted it sonically to be as powerful as it could be. Even some of those quiet songs have got a really nice sense of space and acoustics to them, like the piano on “Privacy” goes back to that classic feel. It’s really nice to allow yourself that kind of slight indulgence.

What else has DJing helped you understand?
Al:
That DJs are full of shit and just get paid money for not doing very much.

Has it influenced the way you approach these songs?
Joe:
It totally does. For me the whole idea of DJing is to play a song and see how people react. The whole thing a DJ is doing is responding to how people react to the music that he plays. So watching that reaction from a crowd is very insightful. It gives you ideas for how dance music can affect people and what things affect people in what ways. That definitely goes into our live shows and structuring songs. Then the kind of rhythms we use, like a track like “Hold On,” I see it taking this minimal techno rhythm and put these disco elements into it. So that’s informed by the minimal techno records that we might be playing when we DJ mixed with the disco records some of us have been playing as well.

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