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Music

"We Are Inherently Political in Our Music": An Interview with Den Sorte Skole

We visited Den Blå Planet with the acclaimed Danish experimental duo and talked politics, music media and sea creatures.

Photography by Sarah Buthmann

Den Blå Planet is a place built on visceral contrasts. On the one hand, visiting Copenhagen’s esteemed aquarium digs up the sense of excitement and innocent wonderment you had as a kid—when you loved smushing your nose against the tanks, spending hours face to face with fuzzy little otters or majestic whales. On the other hand, those otters and whales are in boxes—transplanted from their natural environments into regulated ones designed for you to ogle. The whole thing feels a bit off—which is what we discovered last week when we wandered through Den Blå Planet together with Simon Dokkedal and Martin Højland, the two Danes who make up experimental electronic duo Den Sorte Skole. In a way, however, that oxymoronic environment of Den Blå Planet was a pretty fitting context for a conversation with Den Sorte Skole.
Den Sorte Skole’s latest album, Indians & Cowboys, is a chaotic and frenetic body of work that constantly throws your emotions and senses askew. In case you haven't heard it, you can go download it right now for free on Den Sorte Skole's website. Built on an impressive amount of samples from all over the world, it sounds like a hybrid of contemporary reality—combining the good, the bad, the exciting, the devastating, the confusing, the logical and meshing it all into one experience. We decided to take the duo to Den Blå Planet and ask them about their personal realities and the larger global realities they’re tackling in their music—and also just check out some octopus and sea otters, too.

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NOISEY: Hey, guys. Indians & Cowboys is a pretty challenging album for the average listener—it definitely took me a few listens. Were you conscious you were making an album that ‘challenging’?
Martin: It’s true, we made an album that’s extremely challenging. It takes a lot of time to get into it; some people say it’s the 7th listen that triggered it. It’s definitely our age and the place we’re at in our lives that has something to do with how it’s made. We’ve been around for fourteen years and want to be around for another thirty years; we’ve relaxed into the idea that we aren’t making something for everybody and that won’t be spinning on the mainstream radio.

Was mainstream ever part of your ambition, though?
Simon: Our goal was never to get mainstream in that sense. We actually grew up in a hip-hop environment and that was all about not being mainstream. So for us, the ambition was just to be really good at what we do.

Martin: A lot of people say our new album is the opposite of mainstream—it’s super weird and just not what you hear on the radio. Sure, but a lot of people are doing weird stuff and crazy noise experiments and all that. The challenge is to do weird and interesting stuff and reach people—not just in a small niche community, either. That has always been our aim—to bring people to new places. We want to communicate different music to as many people as possible. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but we can still fill Store Vega with our stuff. Nobody can do that in Denmark with our type of music. That’s a huge privilege for us.

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If you can fill Store Vega with your music, though, does the mainstream even matter anymore?
Martin: Less and less so, although the industry is still super focused on making the right numbers. Music media is still very, very tough to challenge. I think there’s a gap between music media and the crowd. I’m not sure if people find our album challenging, but the media does. I mean, you need to sit down and listen to this as you watch a movie.

Simon: Also, things are now put into boxes. For example, Led Zeppelin’s biggest hit is 11 minutes long; that would never happen today. Today, you need to have a video and a single people can stream… all that bullshit. A lot of people seem to be gearing their stuff towards the media instead of just the people.
Our music doesn’t because it takes a lot of different genres and puts them in one big pile. A lot of people would go home and think to themselves, ‘today, I would like to listen to some jazz or some pop.’ With our music, the genres change all the time. It’s perfect sample music.

It’s one thing to combine genres, but it’s another to make them sound as chaotic as you guys did with Indians & Cowboys. Why did you choose to take it in such a chaotic direction?
Simon: I mean, we’ve been listening to all different kinds of music and that's been layered in us, somehow. That’s also kind of life, I guess—not only in how you experience music but in how you experience everything.

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Martin: We also wanted this album to be more chaotic and crazier because of the times we live in. The album before was more like a collaged fairy-tale; this one’s more fucked up. Our aim has always been to pull in as many different influences as possible in the same expression.

The timing is actually quite good with this album because the tide has turned in Denmark. The political atmosphere is quite rough, hostile and based on fear. In some ways, this album has a lot of fear in its sound and roughness but it’s also pointing to a future where people are in the same boat. It can sound like a Mongolian throat singer rapping on a heavy beat with a Turkish guy playing guitar. In that way, we’ve always been fascinated in making this hybrid from the future where everybody lives on the same planet.

Simon: We also have this dialogue going on in the world about who owns what. Whose right is it to be in Denmark or Europe, suddenly? Who owns the rights to the music? It’s hard to explain but the refugee situation, for example, is also relevant with what we’re doing.

Martin: There’s another dialogue in Denmark right now: can artists and musicians be political? I think of course they can be and more people should be, but the interesting thing isn’t if we have an opinion on the refugee crisis—it’s if our music has something relevant to give politically and artistically. Nowadays, you have somebody like Medina stating that it’s tough times out there for the refugees. And it’s like, 'yeah, good on you for saying that'—I can understand that and maybe it’s good because more people will think about it but it’s not politically interesting.
For us, we are inherently political in our music. Our last album, for example, is political because it’s illegally released. People can sue us. The product is political in itself.

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Is it important to you that people get the political nature of what you’re doing, though? Especially since, as you said, this is an album that demands the attention people would usually give to a movie.
Simon: I think to make money off of making music, you really have to think of it as a project all the time and have a red thread that people understand. So in that way, yes, we are clear in what we’re doing. We also simply don’t have time to sit for four days and work on some track that has no aim.

Martin: It’s also about balance. In the last four or five years, a lot of musicians ended up releasing so much stuff. As a band, that’s a dangerous strategy. The longer you can keep tracks before you release them the more sure you are they’ll have value that will work in three years.

Simon: We’re also from the album era, though. Now, people just do tracks and get really popular. The industry is different and that really makes a difference. We like to do full albums and take the tempo down so people can dig into stuff properly. That's the goal.

Thanks, guys.