Slipped Disco recently teamed up with the inimitable Hell Yeah Recordings to bring some Italian flavour to London’s Last Days of Decadence. Pirate Robot Midget were there. Tom Bassam interviewed them! We say 'them', but there was only a him in the end.

Who am I talking to here cos there are three of you guys right?

I'm E-The-Hot AKA Lorenzo Mangani but there are two more guys who I work with - The King of Basia and Almek.

So E... Pirate Robot Midget, what does that mean then?

Pirate Robot Midget is basically what we are. We are pirates because we steal from other people and make it our own, we are robots because we do everything on computers and we are midgets because we are small.

You guys are from all over the place. How did you meet?

On the internet. That's how everything is done these days. We met on a website where people share the music they like and we liked similar music and we started sending each other stuff and it just sort of happened. This is really how the group works. We send each other stuff and then we'll work on it separately, then send it back to each other and put it all together. I come from a producing background so I tend to finish the stuff off while the other guys come up with the ideas.

How does living in Amsterdam affect your music?

Living in Amsterdam is great because people accept what you are doing. In Italy, where I'm from, if you are a musician everyone thinks you're lazy and don't have a proper job. In Holland people are very supportive and encouraging to what you do. They do not judge. I also like the laws there if you know what I mean.

You guys have done a lot of remixes, Nine-Inch-Nails most famously. What is it about remixes you like?

Like I said we're pirates and I especially like playing around with other stuff and changing it from the original. That's where the singleIt's My Beat Now comes from? It's ironic, because this is actually ours but it's a joke between ourselves. We've made these remixes and now our single is all about something that we're not actually doing in that instance... this is our own.

The EP (It's My Beat Now) is very diverse. The title track sounds very Hip Hop, but other parts are being compared to Justice, why is that?

We have a lot of different influences within the group. I have been producing Hip Hop records for 10 years so I bring a huge Hip Hop influence. But also we don't like to get tied to a particular genre so we can't be labelled as this or that. We don't want to be defined as just one thing. I like bastard music, anything we can mash together we will. We try to be as original as possible. I don't know how successful we are but that is our aim.

Will there be an album and is it gonna sound like anything you've done before?

We've been working on it for more than a year now, but we've ended up trashing most of the stuff we've already done. It's not going to be a compilation of previously released singles, it's gonna be all new. It's obviously going to have influences from the stuff we've done but we want it to be all new. We want it to be more like the remix we did for Yelle than the dance stuff. We don't care about people dancing, we want to make it less dancing and more weird.

Weird?

Yeah, we want it to be one-one-one with the listener. Head-phone music, like we're talking directly to them.

Sounds cool.

Thanks man.

www.myspace.com/piraterobotmidget