We had a chat with Pivots about ‘Fake News’, the latest showcase of their expansive, multi-media vision for immersive viewing experiences
Characterised by its atmospheric feel and their distinctive cocktail of new wave, shoegaze, and electronic production, latest Pivots single ‘Fake News’ sees the duo taking on the media climate of the digital age, and the distorted perceptions and increasingly fractured truths that come with it.
There is trully all-encompassing feel to electronic duo’s style and the way that they present it, pairing it with an artistic music video that doubles down on this idea that everything has been warped and twisted by the media, making for a world where you have no idea what to trust or where to turn to get your information. The sound feels gripping and focussed throughout while the themes do a great job of getting under your skin and leaving a memorable impression. We loved this release and the depth and uniqueness that is packed into it, so had a chat with Pivots to find a bit more about it, the ideas behind it, and how it all came together.
Hey! We love your new single ‘Fake News’. What m’ore can you tell us about it?
Thanks! We’re really happy you like it- we’ve been overwhelmed by people’s responses to the song and the video.
Fake News was one of the first tracks Pol and I wrote, and has felt like a bit of a blueprint in terms of the way we approach song writing and production. We disappeared into our studio in Paris and started experimenting with long improvised sessions, where we then went back and sampled chunks of it, to deliberately break the normal path we might have taken when writing. Some of these techniques we borrowed from Surrealist ideas like automatic writing” or “ The Exquisite Corpse”, Burroughs’ cut-up technique and generally introducing as much unpredictability into the process as possible!
Having our own studio in Paris, just a few minutes from where we live, has also been transformative. We can work every day without pressure, spend hours experimenting, record strange loops and throw ideas together without overthinking them.
Fake News actually began with Pol creating this bizarre, scratchy guitar loop while I was processing it. By the end of each bar it sounded like the guitar was literally falling apart. That immediately started a conversation about how information behaves online—something that starts out clear and truthful gradually degrades into distortion, embellishment and eventually complete fiction.
We’re not anti-technology though – in fact, Pivots is as much a celebration of new technology as it is a critique of how we use it.
What was the process like putting it together?
Once that original loop existed, the song sort of began explaining itself to us.
One of the advantages of working in our studio is that we don’t always spend the whole day making music. Sometimes we just sit and talk—about films we’ve watched, books we’ve read, games we’ve played, ideas we’ve had or people we’ve met. Those conversations often become just as important as actually recording.
Modern production tools are amazing, but they can make everything sound sterile and similar. We use field recordings, broken equipment, tape machines and found sounds to introduce a bit of chaos.
The video came from the same idea. Social media throws everything at you at once—a cat video, an air strike, a protein shake, a warning about carcinogenics , and pulls you in all these different emotional directions, which are all somehow all presented with equal importance. We wanted the visuals to recreate that strange emotional whiplash.
What were your biggest influences when creating it?
Adam Curtis has had a massive impact on us. His documentaries connect politics, technology and culture in a way that feels both unsettling and strangely beautiful, and that definitely fed into the atmosphere of Fake News.
Musically, we’re always trying to blur the line between organic performances and synthetic worlds.
What inspired you to tie together music and art in the creative way that you do?
It feels like music, film, games and interactive media are all becoming one creative language.
Most people discover a band through a few seconds of video on their phone, so music and visuals are inseparable now.
That’s one of the reasons we started developing the technology behind our immersive shows. Originally it was just meant to be a one-off experiment, but it’s since taken us to Buenos Aires, Tokyo, Texas and beyond.
People attending those performances experience something that’s part live concert, part music video, part installation and part multiplayer game.
In many ways it isn’t that different from the psychedelic happenings of the 1960s, Pink Floyd’s early multimedia performances, or the German idea of Gesamtkunstwerk—the “total artwork”, where different artistic disciplines combine to create something entirely new.
Today we have access to game engines, interactive technology, spatial sound, video, AI and real-time graphics. Those tools allow us to tell stories that simply weren’t possible for previous generations of musicians, and that’s incredibly exciting.
What else do you have planned for the near future?
We’ve got another single on the way and more immersive shows coming across Paris, the UK and Germany.
Right now we’re enjoying letting these songs evolve on stage rather than keeping them trapped in the studio. If a track starts feeling too comfortable or predictable, we’ll deliberately push it somewhere unexpected.
One of the exciting things about being in this band is that the music often seems to have its own idea about what it wants to be, its own momentum. Rather than forcing songs into a particular shape, we tend to let them evolve naturally—and if something starts feeling too familiar or too conventional, we’ll deliberately throw obstacles in its path.
Its a bit like that famous David Bowie quote about swimming to where you are a little bit out of your depth.
We’re always trying to make work that surprises us first. If it does that, hopefully it’ll surprise everyone else too.
We are putting some videos of us in the studio on our instagram, where you can also find out about upcoming shows we are planning
