GAYLETTER

Soft isn’t just an easily defined texture but a mood that flows through an album built out of 4 years of work with multiple producers. At the center is Dan Bodan, the vocalist who pulls together the dizzying sounds, aesthetics and contradictions of romance in the Internet age. Hazy yet emotionally evocative, Soft is surprisingly straight forward and coherent considering the diverse musical backgrounds of the albums singer and producers. Bodan has roots in musical theater as much as punk and noise, and Physical Therapy, one of the album’s producers is a frequent DJ at Shade and GHE20G0TH1k. Bridging the divide between singer-song-writer and the sounds of late nights spent at the club, Soft brings romance to the apocalypse. We sat down to talk with Dan Bodan about his music, reviews and life in Berlin.

You began in nightlife in Montreal? Kind of, in the Noise scene.

How do you think the Noise scene began your evolution to where you are now? I think maybe just an appreciation for the fact that there is an underground. And also finding the pitfalls of that underground. You can’t necessarily grow into certain things if you’re compartmentalized into one little scene. It has its niche so if you grow bored of it you kind of have to leave it.

When you moved to Berlin did you feel like you found similar pitfalls? Yeah, well I got into the art world and that’s another pitfall. I think my childhood was pretty boring so when I got to Berlin and it was so affordable and so free and there was no stress regarding where to live and how to work; the world was my oyster. I worked in the art world as a photo assistant to a lot of the better editorial photographers in Germany, and I was working in a dark room developing their contact sheets.

How did you move from the visuals of being in the art world and working with photographers into being a musician and developing your own sound? I think it was always hand in hand, because at university I studied film and photos. I just always knew that you have to have a really strong aesthetic quality to whatever you do because otherwise your message can get really screwed up.

How have you reacted to reviews? I’ve made a list now of everyone who I sound like according to reviews and it’s very long. I kind of feel like finding a computer scientist to put all the mentions into a program and get samples of all those voices, and depending on how many times they were mentioned come out with a tone and see if that tone is actually similar to mine or not. Or just completely bullshit.

How would you describe Soft? I think when the album first came out there was a lot of misunderstanding because people were expecting something from me to go more obtusely weird and weird is just kind of a stupid adjective to ever describe yourself as because it’s meaningless.

I’m curious about the way your songs have this universal appeal that isn’t just a gay love song, or isn’t something that I can only relate to if I’m at the club until 6 in the morning. I try to write them in such a way that if someone can’t relate to what it is I’m writing about then they can at least listen to it as a kind of theater. And if they are going through something, even if it’s not what I’m thinking about when I’m writing but they think it is, then that’s something therapeutic to them.

You’ve been in Berlin 8 years now, how have you found living there, relationships, making your way in Berlin versus Montreal? I haven’t dated too many people in Berlin and when I have they have been primarily American. There’s something that I need in language, which is funny because I’m half French. There’s something that I need, maybe it’s a certain sense of humor.

How do you see your music fitting into the music coming out today? You don’t just listen to something because it’s weird, you listen to something that’s very important. Is the FKA Twigs album very good, I don’t know, but I know it’s very important. That’s what bothers me more; you aren’t really able to formulate a love for something because you have to go into it with this love. The hype machine is one thing but it’s this idea of having social value right from the get go, you know the Kanye thing, he’s kind of the king of that and he makes it work. It’s something relatively new in the last 10 years; that people need to be historicized immediately.

A lot of your music deals with digital romance, how did you find yourself online? I should say that my online community wasn’t a gay thing, it was gaming. Romantically I developed normally I think, I mean I’m emo, well I’m over emotional. I sought out creative communities online, I mean there was porn so I could deal with my sexuality myself in 5 minutes. I felt ostracized for being a bit of a loner more than for being gay. At least until High School, when things got easier for me and I was just hanging out with stoners and sneaking out to raves. My first real community was the rave scene. Just kids who were finally doing art, whatever that meant.

You also write from the perspective of a hacker, how did that find its way into your music? I wrote ‘Romeo’ as a tribute to the hacking community. I was a hacker when I was young but I just hacked into porn websites. Eventually, Anonymous and Hacktivism started to erupt and I began to just romanticize it and I found it to be a really undeveloped place in pop music. There’s a few people, like Unicorn Kid I guess, him and I were exploring that, we would chat because we were doing it around the same time. So when I saw the Hacktivists coming under attack and the tribulations of it, me and my friend were talking about it, man what’s it like to be a hacker in the world finding out the world is really awful, how does that really feel? It’s like hacking into your girlfriends account and finding out she’s fucking other people. Oh the curiosity killed the cat. It’s like the scientists who research the environment and how they have to deal with massive depression because they’ve just discovered doomsday.