informatik

Informatik started as a spark between Da5id Din and Matthew Crofoot back in 1994. It was a time when the future felt wide open — we were experimenting with sound, pushing against the walls of genre, and chasing that particular electricity you feel when everything is new and unfiltered. Their first album, Direct Memory Access, came out the next year on their own label, SINless Records. It hit hard, especially the single “At Your Command,” which carved out a space for them in the growing electronic underground. Not long after, Metropolis Records stepped in to re-release the album as DMA v2.0, adding a few extra tracks and giving it a wider reach.

By 2002, the lineup had changed — Matthew stepped away, and I joined Da5id to help shape the next phase. We were both restless, searching for something bigger, more emotional, and more cinematic. The result was Nymphomatik — an album that fused dancefloor sensibilities with a kind of aching, romantic intensity. It was polished and immediate but still carried a weird, urgent pulse underneath it all. People responded to that. Tracks like “A Matter of Time” and “Flesh Menagerie” found their way into clubs around the world. That success gave us the momentum to follow it up with Re:Vision — part retrospective, part reimagining.

After a few years, we found ourselves wanting to leave the club behind — not completely, but enough to make room for something more vulnerable. That became Beyond in 2008, a record that confused a few people but felt completely right to us. We folded in more guitars, more space, and let the songs breathe a little differently. “It Always Ends The Same” was a statement of intent — moody, slow-burning, almost mournful. Beyond was our attempt to stretch beyond expectations, and it changed how we thought about the project.

We gave the fans a way in, too — releasing the Temporary remix EP for free and letting others reshape the songs however they wanted. That spirit of openness stayed with us, and when we made Arena in 2009, it felt like we were building songs for massive, imaginary venues — music that was bold and cinematic but still deeply personal. It featured some of our biggest-sounding work yet: “The World Belongs To Us,” “Night and Day,” “Falling.” That year we toured Europe with Mesh — another reminder that this music could move across borders and language and find a home with people we’d never met.

In 2013, we returned with Playing With Fire. It wasn’t a reinvention, just the next step — a darker, tighter, more muscular record. The songs still wore their hearts on their sleeves, but the production was leaner, more intentional. We were still chasing the same feeling that got us into this in the first place — a kind of controlled chaos, a mixture of beauty and tension.

Informatik has always been about dualities: machine vs. human, soft vs. loud, programmed vs. organic. We’ve never been interested in playing it safe. Every album is a snapshot of who we were at the time — a record of how we felt, what we feared, what we were hoping to say before the moment passed.

And we’re not finished yet.