What do you consider to be acts of rebellion?
I consider everything you do to be acts of rebellion in your daily life. Things that come from a place very deep inside you, from a place of freedom, that change something you don’t like or that you are against. Originally, the record’s name was little acts of rebellion, but I didn’t want it to sound shy, so I took out the “little.”
I want to inspire people to revolt. I want people to feel like they have the power to change the world, and that it doesn’t have to be huge. You don’t have to go and defeat Trump immediately; you can do little things every single day. Small gestures add up over time. It is the opposite of a capitalist economy, which is about acting and producing all the time.
One of the album’s instrumental tracks is called “let them have the internet,” and it quite literally sounds like the internet breaking down. Where did that title come from, and what is your relationship with the internet in general?
The title of that song came from the media theorist Douglas Rushkoff, who has written a lot of books about the internet and its impact on humanity. He was in Silicon Valley when it all started; he was a punk, doing acid with all the guys that were starting to come up with the idea of the internet.
From a philosophical standpoint, the internet was supposed to be for everyone, free and open. But then it became capitalist, and now we do everything online and everything is mediated by companies. I’ve had this love-hate relationship with the internet because of that. [Rushkoff] has this podcast called Team Human, and in the first episode he has this beautiful moment where he’s like, “At first I was mad because these companies took our internet away. But then I realized the more the capitalistic world goes online, the more free we are in real life, because we can just turn our phones off and nobody’s selling us anything. The hugging, the kissing, the five people sitting in a room and conspiring together—that all happens offline.” So with this song, I’m like, “Fuck it. Let them have the internet, and we can have life outside of it.”
[…] When Kraftwerk’s Florian Schneider died earlier this year, you mentioned on Twitter that nothing has influenced your approach to music more than that group.
Kraftwerk was the first time I saw the aesthetic of electronic music and the structure of pop songs put together. If I hadn’t listened to Kraftwerk, I’d never have been interested in electronic music. I would have always stayed on the other side, just listening to it and dancing to it. But when I heard Kraftwerk, it was like, “I can make people feel things in their gut and make them sing songs at home and feel seen.”
It was also that sense of perfect humanity, between being a technician and a musician. I have a very profound fascination with machines. I’m very technical. I can fix all my machines; I know how to solder. I understand the circuitry perfectly. That capacity to understand machines and play them, and have the music sound human, even though it’s electronic, is also part of the inspiration I draw from Kraftwerk. It’s everything I aspire to create through songs.
Ela Minus Makes Techno-Pop for Everyday Rebellion