Dada Life beefing up dance music

Dada Life has been pumping out seriously fun songs for years, from "White Noise/Red Meat" to "Happy Violence" and "Kick Out The Epic (Expletive)." But the Swedish duo is also changing dance music in a technical way.

Dada Life created a software plug-in called "The Sausage Fattener," which makes music sound fatter. (You can hear their fat sound when they perform tonight at club XS, with a new album out, "The Rules of Dada.")

I will spare you most of the Sausage Fattener's technical details (it's a single-channel compressor).

But when a musician turns up the Sausage Fattener, it explodes the dynamics of a song or instrument, making this tone sound like THIS TONE. It's not a vertical volume rise. It's a horizontal dynamics blowout.

Now, the Sausage Fattener has become a go-to tool for many of the biggest DJs in the world, from Kaskade to Laidback Luke, Tiesto, Chuckie and beyond.

I found one video on YouTube where a musician uses the Sausage Fattener on orchestral music to make horns sound more grandiose.

Dada Life's Olle Corneer says he and his DJ mate Stefan Engblom hired a software designer to make their simple, two-knob Sausage Fattener, because they previously used many other effects to achieve their signature fatness.

Then Dada Life decided to sell the fattener, so other DJs could benefit from the same process.

"We just thought, 'Why not give the opportunity to other producers to have that combination of effects in a simple package?' " Corneer says.

"And it just spread like wildfire until the point where every producer in the world is using it. We never expected that."

He says the duo isn't worried other DJ-producers can now overuse Dada Life's signature move, because their goal is to always change creatively, "to shock ourselves and our listeners with every song we create."

"So to us, it doesn't matter if they copy our sound, because in six month's time, we're going to sound completely different anyway."

They're working on a follow-up plug-in, but he says it's not ready to be released or explained.

But he says the Sausage Fattener sequel will also deal with tonal output.

"Tone is so important for us," he says. "We want to make something sugary, sweet and nice - but at the same way it should be an evil, hard and nose-bloody, crashing-into-worlds feeling.

"It's kind of easy to make something that's sugary, poppy and commercial. And it's kind of easy to do something that's hard and monotonous and driving. But it's really hard to have those two working in the same song.

"That's when music is interesting to me, when two different elements meet, rub off each other and create something you never thought possible in the first place - something unexpected."

Doug Elfman's column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. Email him at delfman@reviewjournal.com. He blogs at reviewjournal.com/elfman.