Datarock on their newest album and the incorporation of AI
Datarock was born and bred in Bergen, Norway and have been continuously reinventing themselves in the electronic rock genre. The seven-piece group was created in the early 2000s and has entered many new eras for the last 23 years. Their newest endeavor? The relationship between AI and creative fields.
Datarock released their latest album, “Media Consumption Pyramid”, in late September, 2023.
The album cover, music videos, and social media imagery are all AI generated. Frontman Fredrik Saroea seems to be on the forefront of embracing AI in creative fields, such as in music. Although finding it problematic and fearful, he uses it more as an early exploration of the technology and what can be done with it. The ten-track album has a multitude of inspirations which seep into each song, the diverse sound providing a different listening experience with each track.
Photo via Instagram.
We had a chance to speak with Fredrik Saroea in his three days in New York City at the Chelsea Hotel.
Give a brief insight into Datarock, who are you, what do you create?
Oh lord. We're a group of now pretty adult friends who started the band 23 years ago. I don't think I've matured much since I was 12. We started back when we were in our early 20s. It was a super interesting time. For the first time you had this really interesting thing happening simultaneously all over the world, technology. You were able to share music very efficiently. And we had come from the vinyl world. The only way vinyl worked is if you had some friend or associate who had a network over the world. Eventually we had that. The club scene in the 2000s was such a weird interesting mesh of different scenes. It was partly somewhat intellectual, somewhat political. You had some feminist bands, some really doofus dumb bands. But we had this really international scene where creativity was important and where nobody thought about commercialism. Then online came. We started the band kind of as a joke, and we ended up playing 1,000 shows in 36 countries.
You’ve been playing since the 2000s and have had a lot of members come and go. How has the band transitioned into this new era in 2023?
You're absolutely correct. People came and left. But they came and left again. Then came and left again. A lot of back and forth. What's new about the album is that everybody is a part of it, and it's never been like that before. It's a testimony to the fact that we haven't ended up fighting. All bands end up hating each other. Some disagreements and quarles and difficulties. All the key members are part of the album and play shows together, up to seven people on stage. What really happened, I’d say in my case, is I released a solo album. What happens then is you start pushing your solo stuff into the band. And because I'm the singer and the time in the band, I perhaps think I put a little too much of myself in the band before. Some of the other guys released solo albums throughout the last 20 years. I was the only one who didn't. I think I forced a little bit too much of myself, but after I released solo material I really understood and appreciated how much of a collaborative nature that band is supposed to be. Even some of the guys who never contributed are contributing a lot now. That's why I'm so proud of the album. It became a collaborative group of friends again.
What draws you so heavily to the color red? Do you feel like it's now a trademark of the band?
Yeah it is. The city we’re from is called Bergen. It's an old town in Norway so it was built of wood. It burned many times. So there's a lot of pride in that city, and because of fire red is the color of the city. We didn’t think much of that to be honest. Do you want to hear the truth? When we started we were total nerds, this is such a nerd band. What we found really assuming is the contrast between our level of nerdiness and combining that with the most capitalist swine industry, which is Formula 1. We found it really funny to have the masculine sporty image. We could never afford having Formula 1 suits. It was kind of a coincidence. Nobody advised us, it was all very random. But we've done it for so long. Now we have black suits.
Your musical interests have stretched across many different genres. What led you to the genre in which your music sits now?
I started hosting my own radio show when I was 12. We would have weekly topics that could be Detroit techno, 30s jazz. So ever since I was a child I was very interested in a huge variety of different genres, because my neighbor had a record collection of 7,000 records which was unheard of. I grew up with the internet before the internet. I grew up with a lot of musical stimulation. But the thing that really blew my mind was the merging of electronic music with guitar rock. For me that happened in Manchester in the late 80s. Throughout the album there is a huge variety of influences.
Do you think that makes your music more diverse sounding since you have such a multifaceted background?
I think so. It makes it a lot of fun for us. I realized it's hard for people to connect to your multitude of songs because they vary so much. We'll never have that homogenous style of music. I have to be honest with you, we’re very surprised that anybody even cares, because we never tried to make ourselves successful. But it's a little stressful.
You used AI to help with all the imagery surrounding this new album. With many so fearful of AI, especially being in a creative field, do you feel as though you are at the forefront of this new wave?
Yes and no, because we didn’t do it to embrace it. We kind of did it to point out how problematic it is. Because we prompted the AI to create specific signature style animations which steal our favorite illustrations, out of love and to be able to talk about this. I think so much great is going to come from AI. So terrible too. Trust me, AI isn’t going to take over the world, but it will take over some parts. But to a certain extent I find a lot of it fascinating positive, a lot of it fascinating negative. We didn’t really want to embrace it like, ‘yippee!’ It was more like, ‘let's talk about this.’ In our case it was more like we wanted to talk about it. Also it was very hard to get all the seven band members to get together to take a fucking photo.
What is the strategy behind using AI for music videos?
For the “Heart Shaped Circle” video, is it very specifically prompted to steal or replicate a signature style of a french artist. We wanted to see what the reaction was when we emulated his very particular style. It's not his pencil stroke, it's his motif, facial expressions, his color palette, choice of pigments, everything. And it steals everything. So that's how we ended up with that. It morphed one image to another. We wanted to play along to how AI doesn't think how we do. We wanted to play along with kind of the underdeveloped sides of AI, that's why it's morphing all the time. If you look closely, the hand isn’t resting, it’s out through the wall, which is kind of showing how AI doesn’t have an understanding of the world. It doesn't have object consistency.
So you use AI as kind of an early exploration?
Yes, 100%.
What was the creation process like for the album?
It was such a weird experience because I shouldn't say this out loud but covid was great for us. Life slowed down. What happened to us was, I mean we spent a lot of time in our own studio. And to be honest we didn’t know we were making an album. We kind of remember how we started when we were young. And at that time we never made a fucking dollar. The first show we ever did in New York was the Knitting Factory and we got $10. Same thing in Chicago. What happened was we were picked up by a booking agent. So we didn’t make any money but we made these amazingly cool brilliant people. In the process you start making a little bit of money, which is shared out to a lot of people. So then everybody expects you're supposed to do something not particularly lucrative but make some business. But when covid came you didn’t have to show any sign of a business sense. You could spend time together and nobody cared if it was a radio hit or not. Nobody gave a fuck. We didn’t make this album thinking anybody would care. But we did, and we had a lot of fun.
What was the inspiration behind the album?
Sonically, it was how we interact musically. When we make music it comes naturally. We’ll make demos and I'll instantly hear the entire melody, and then I have to write the lyrics afterwards. The lyrical content, I spent so much time writing those lyrics. I did a lot of research for the lyrics too. The reason it's called Media Consumption Pyramid is because it was all recorded and written during covid. I just realized that back in the 2000s being a movie nerd was kind of a subculture, to being knowledgeable about those things. Like gaming, it used to be an underground culture. I’ve been a part of subcultures since I was a kid. And now it’s mainstream. I started digging into how online and social media is affecting people in recent years. We know for a fact that to a very large extent it's easy to manipulate. And it's going to be ten items worse with AI. This is what you have to be aware and aggressive about nowadays.