DJ duo Dada Life on pillow fights, musical madness and keeping it weird

In Southeast Asia to headline It’s The Ship, the largest floating dance musical festival in the region, the pair behind one of Stockholm’s most eccentric electro house acts sat down for a chat with Southeast Asia Globe

People who listen to Dada Life tend to be pretty eccentric. Do you like to keep it weird?
Olle: I mean, the name [Dada Life] is coming from that [it is a nod to the absurdist movement of the early 1900s]. That’s how it started. It’s about doing the Dada, or doing the Dada Life. And whatever that means to you, as a person, we don’t want to tell that to people because that kind of makes it too much like a manual. But it’s about doing stuff differently, being flipped on your head, so to speak. Doing the opposite of everyone else.
Do you want your audience to be feeling something specific when listening to your music, or do you want them to do their own thing?
Olle: Yeah, the latter. We don’t say that much, we don’t want to tell people what it’s about, if it’s about anything at all (laughs). So you can enjoy it on different levels. If you have heard about Dadaism, that’s for you to find out yourself. If people come and just go, ‘Oh, this is a great party,’ that’s fine too.
Stefan: We have the rules of Dada, of course. But those rules are more to help people get into their own Dada Life. Leave your brain at home, don’t overthink stuff. Come and have fun, and you will see.
Do you have any creative differences? Do you argue?
Olle: All the time. Probably from the actual beginning, when we started making music, we started arguing about music. That’s one of the reasons why it went so well in the first place. We have completely different views of everything. From what music we like, to the music we make, to when a track is finished. Everything. And I think the formula has been to meet somewhere in the middle. When we’ve met there, it’s finished. Neither of us are probably 100% happy, but that’s why it’s a true collaboration.
You set the world record for the largest pillow fight, as well as the most people dressed up as fruit…
Olle: Most people don’t know this, but we learned it the hard way when we did this one. Breaking an official Guinness record is so much work. Following the rules for it to be official means that you have to fly out an official representative from the Guinness company. I think they needed one representative for 50 or 100 people. So we ended up having 100 people employed for the night, controlling the pillow fight.