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Words: Frances Morgan
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BATTLES
New York avant rock quartet Battles are all tooled up for serious fun with a prismatic new album full of brainiac body music and pointillist party tunes. They tell Plan B how it's done - with mirrors, not maths
“When we write songs, we have these charts on the wall, big pieces
of easel paper, and we take a magic marker and write down names for the sections,” says Battles guitarist and keyboard player Ian Williams.
“Instead of it being traditional notation, we write down words to describe the parts, so
‘Tij’ starts with – what was the first thing?
Drummer John Stanier booms out, “‘Wooh!’”
“Huh?” says Ian.
“‘Wooh!’” the rest of the band say, quite matter-of-factly.
Ian continues: “Then it goes into – “
Dave Konopka (guitar, bass) interrupts: “‘Tij loop’, ‘Burkina Faso’…”
“‘Burkina Faso’, yeah. Then it goes into, I think, Can –"
“‘Can Melody’. Then ‘Fela In Berlin’,” Dave elaborates
“ No, first it goes to ‘Crouching Fela’,” Ian corrects him. “Then ‘Fela Goes To Berlin’.”
“Before the percussive bit it’s called ‘Loveboat’, and then ‘In Brazil’…”
Ian concludes. “So we think of the music as concepts that aren’t as normal as bars of music, and I think that creates a weird effect.”
“On ‘Tonto’, there’s this weird descending vocal line, and it sounded kinda creepy,” says Tyondai Braxton, whose treated vocals weave through the mix as he too takes turns on guitar, keys and electronics.
“It sounded like The Addams Family to me, so we called it ‘Anjelica Huston’. Ian came up with this line that sounded like a galloping animal, so we called it ‘Brer Rabbit’.
So you look on the chart, and it says: ‘First section: Anjelica Huston to Brer Rabbit’, and it’s funny, but it has a nice energy. The characters have such dominant identities that it’s easy to feed into that. It’s fun.”
So out of marker pens, art paper, funny muso references and colour/sound associations springs the music of Battles: hyper-aware, conceptual, precise and organised as a flow-chart or record collection. Nice. Neat.
Except that Battles’ music is nothing of the sort – or, if it is, the organisation and precision are gleefully derailed by constant mischief, and skilfully disguised by snagging hooks and monster beats, by electronic shrapnel and synth whimsy, by chirping falsetto vocals and larger-than-life melodies that’ll spiral out into a minimalist, multi-hued mesh one minute and then march all over a song like an army of cartoon animals the next.
The first song on Battles’ new album on Warp Records, Mirrored, is called ‘Race: In’, and it does, with frantic percussion, pitter-patter guitar and a whistly keyboard line. Everything’s sharp, tiny, precise like a tattoo needle, increasing volume and colour until the song breaks out into a baroque stomp.
Then it’s back to the beginning, but this time with added call-and-answer vocals, a vague virtual choir embellished with more keyboards, more guitars as the song’s two stages pile into each other and you see suddenly how they fit together. You get to stand back and admire the structure for about a minute before the track evaporates, leaving the next structure to rise like a time-lapse film of a termite mound springing up in a desert. And hey, we all know how cool that is to watch. Did you know some of those things are over 13 metres high, the termite equivalent of a 100-mile high skyscraper?
Mirrored is well named. Its structure is prismatic, designed to allow maximum colour and light. It’s a brain-pop record that art-rocks, a record designed to exercise mind and body.
This latter claim was made for Battles’ last release, a collection of their EPs to date, but while there was no knocking their infectious, tight guitars and Stanier’s powerhouse drumming, EP C/B EP’s sense of joy was cerebral rather than physical, from Steve Reich-ian beginning to skronky end.
Song titles were abbreviated and abstract (‘IPT-2’, ‘TRAS 2’), and even the track entitled ‘DANCE’ was so frenetic, pixellated and splintery it would likely only fill the floor in a nightclub for ants.
In contrast, Mirrored, is both monolithically together and totally all over the show, both qualities that, combined, inspire both feet and head. It takes the tight melodic and rhythmic interplay of the EPs and reconstructs it via a cast of sounds and characters drawn from all over an imagined, synthesised musical world: from Burundi drummers to electric guitar orchestras to Sun Ra’s Arkestra to Viking re-enactments to samba troupes to minimalist composers to beatboxers to headbangers to a hardcore band in a Lagos highlife club transposed to late-night Cologne via Canterbury 1974 and then back to an eclectic, experimental New York City, which is where the four members of Battles began playing together in 2002.
choral fixations
It’s the start of the decade, and Ian Williams is playing solo shows after the disbanding of long-standing Pittsburgh trio DonCaballero, unsure, he says, “If I wanted to be in a band. I had run into Ty and we talked about doing some loosely structured one-off shows, and over a year or so it grew a little more serious. I knew Dave because he was in [Boston instrumental band > Lynx, and Don Caballero had played with Lynx."
When Konopka showed up in New York, Williams was keen to work with him. “Somebody asked us to do a show at the Knitting Factory, so it seemed to make sense to ask Dave to play with us.”
As John Stanier, veteran of spartan hardcore/metal outfit Helmet and the band’s rhythmic driving force, completed the lineup, Williams had an idea he needed to get out of his system.
“The only thing driving me to want to start a band was the idea of playing with a chorus of singers, and it was almost like the quixotic nature of that quest that drove me, ” he relates
John interjects: “A chorus of girl singers…”
Ian: “Of lady singers, yeah.” He sighs. “It was very logistically challenging. We did try.”
Dave: “We did one show without a drummer and three girls, pre-John, and then we did two shows with eight girls each.”
Ian: “We did one show, we called it Press Conference, and we set up a long folding table, like a conference table. Each girl had a microphone…”
Dave: “That was cool, that was the closest Battles has ever come to doing a cover. We had the girls go ‘ah-ah-AHHHH-AHHHHHH!’ [sings the vocal intro from Led Zeppelin’s ‘Immigrant Song’ >, and we just kept looping that…”
So where did this idea come from, Ian?
Williams seems a little embarrassed. “I had some vague idea of funky music like The Meters playing behind 12 Iggy Pop females, like ‘Wargghhhh!!!’,” he demonstrates with an Iggy scream. “I don’t know…I had that idea for a long time…”
Konopka picks up the story. “Ty was working at The Onion, so he put an ad in for girl actors to audition. We hung out at the practice space one day and had different girls coming by, actresses, students and stuff. It was really bizarre.”
“So we had all these conceptual challenges defining what the band was at first,” Williams continues. “At first, it was like we were tackling a lot of material – the concept of a girl singer band, the press conference at a rock show…there were so many ingredients. Eventually two things happened at the same time: we focused a lot on playing by ourselves, and we got offered a tour playing in Japan. We got the chance to play 12 shows in a row. That was the first time I felt like this was going to be a good band. So we shed the girl singer thing and became a tightly functioning band.”
effect/affect
Although it’s kind of a shame the ladies’ choir didn’t work out, the treated vocals that now comprise an important part of Battles music seem more in keeping with the band’s methodology. Occasionally heard onEP C/B EP, Braxton’s voice, layered and effected, adds a disconcerting texture to Mirrored.
Frequently, call-and-response is used to create the impression of massed, genderless, almost ghostly singers. A real choir might perhaps have had too many cultural signifiers: as it is, Braxton’s freedom to manipulate his vocals sits perfectly with Battles’ interest in the pure sonics of a musical style, rather than what it ‘means’.
Braxton seems to agree. “I feel like a lot of the music we make is pretty neutral, so to have traditional vocal lines makes a song lean in one way, and it reduces the song to have vocals up front and the rest of the song at the back. When your instrument is literally explaining something, in a language that people are translating, it takes you out of – ”
“ – a musical realm,” says Williams.
“ Yeah – especially with a band like this where you’re relying on the colours and the characters of the music interacting with each other.”
Braxton is well versed in vocal manipulation: pre-Battles he worked as a solo artist using loops and layers to create mini-orchestras – and choirs – in the ether. “It’s about finding a way to – I don’t want to say obscure it, but to use the vocals to match the quality of the music,” he says. “In my solo stuff, I’ve always played with my vocals through effects, so it’s just a matter of trying to find a musicality with the effects, to turn vocals into something they’re not.”
work in progress
People hear a lot of things in Battles’ music. When they played at London’s Luminaire last year, while
I was thinking nice things like ‘Fela Kuti’ and ‘Black Dice’, my gig companion tried to distract me by speculating that Battles sounded a hell of a lot like Seventies progressive rock dinosaurs Yes: “It’s just like ‘Roundabout’!” he whispered, gleefully, during one song.
Part of me knew he just said it to make me laugh, because Yes are funny, and that it was a joke on the fashionable audience as much as the band. But equally, the comparison bugged me, because I could hear how Battles’ web-like, note-filled instrumentals might form a weird Venn diagram between a number of genres, those acceptable and those ’unacceptable’ – perhaps through this very process of obscuring what those genres or styles represent, so that we appreciate their form rather than focus on their extra-musical baggage.
I’m not trying to call out Battles for being noodly prog-heads – when asked, Stanier is happy to cite a youthful liking for Yes, Rush and King Crimson, but cautions: “I would never want Battles to be perceived in that way. Most of those bands were viewed as ‘serious’ musicians, and a lot of that stuff isn’t very fun to play or to listen to. We are very passionate, but we don’t take ourselves too seriously.”
Williams admits, “I know I’ve always had a bit of the Fripp in me, but the goal has never been to mine that stuff”;
while Braxton sees it as just another label, “As fair a comparison as any other genre people have associated us with”.
Konopka says, “I don’t comprehend too many parallels between Battles and prog, other than the fact that there’s an apparent challenge of traditional musical composition. I think The Mars Volta is a way more accurate depiction of a band that is carrying the prog torch. Don’t get me wrong, I love the shit out of Yes, particularly Close To The Edge and Fragile, and I’ve had an extremely healthy diet of progressive rock in my life,” he continues. “But intentionally sounding like a progressive rock band is something that is not really on the Battles radar.”
What intrigues me is not really that Battles’ set reminded my friend of a Yes song; it’s more that, by drawing upon prog’s rhythmic adventurism, its opening up of song structure and eclectic approach to sound sources, Battles remind us how much fun ambitious rock music can be, on its own terms.
Much of Battles’ music, for me, audibly addresses the issue of influence, of how music ‘uses’ material from disparate sources. As well as mining its own history, popular music has a long tradition of plundering other cultures and genres for exotic effect, but this decade has seen the process become seamless and confident to the point where it no longer seems so loaded as ‘plundering’, and feels more like navigation or observation, with music as a fast-flowing stream of pure information.
This is possibly what Tyondai Braxton implies when talking about ‘neutrality’ in music: the freedom to divorce source material from its cultural context. Battles’ music does this a lot, throwing referential curve-balls from all over pop culture without ever actually directly quoting – something is always off or skewed; something about the resulting sound is always intrinsically Battles-ish.
“I’ve been saying that this band is a very cool example of what the modern band is today,” Braxton considers. “With the ease of access that you have to different types of music – via iTunes, via media in general – we have so much more of
a bee line to more bizarre and harder-to-locate art. There’s not as much of a stigma about referencing something that you might not totally have studied or understand. I feel like we’re just able to grab from this pot unabashedly and present what we like.
“But there’s an honesty in that too, because we’re not trying to sell it to you that we’re masters of all these things. What we’re showing, I think, is that we love all this music and we’re trying to incorporate it in ways that we think are interesting.”
all that glitters
This decade has seen musicians from Timbaland to DIY ethnomuiscological crews like Gang Gang Dance and Aa recontextualise far-flung sounds with dizzying speed. Everything is permitted; nothing is ‘real’. The internet increasingly enables musicians to use recorded sound as a kind of huge lending library whose collection seems to increase both spatially and temporally every day.
Battles are in no way unique in their pluralist approach, then: but their tightly honed musicality allows them to take their source material truly forward by knocking it sideways, as the Nigerian-style guitar riff that flits in and out of ‘Tonto’ is buffeted by angular, avant-rock picking, slicing in at an unexpected angle.
“When the band started, one advantage we had was that it was four people who already had a pretty serious past,” Williams reminds me. “It’s not like the band started from scratch and at the same time were leaning how to play our instruments. That allows you to concentrate on doing something unique and not having to worry about playing.”
“But there’s still this fine line,” says Stanier.
“It’s very easy to overplay and get like, ‘We can do anything, so now we’re gonna play an Egyptian song meets whatever’…”
Do you think it ever happens by accident?
“Maybe. I don’t think you can get too comfortable or else you get carried away and it becomes uninteresting. It still has to be sort of naïve. This band still enters with a total blank canvas, in an almost childish way. That’s where the humorous aspect comes out.”
Battles’ emphasis on playfulness and humour sits beside a preoccupation with their own process, which is informed by a kind of constant awareness of where music is right now, where they fit into it and how to externalise this. Of course, that sounds boring as shit, but what emerges is thrillingly irreverent weird fun party music.
‘Atlas’, Mirrored’s first single, is a case in point. Its genesis was Stanier’s fascination with schaffel, the techno sub-genre spawned by Kompakt Records DJs in Cologne earlier this decade, which was based around the dumb clunk-thunk of the ‘glitterbeat’, as popularised in the Seventies by Slade and Gary Glitter (and itself a sort of sci-fi, supersized take on Fifties rock’n’roll rhythms).
On one level, you don’t need to know anything about schaffel, or even Slade, to dig ‘Atlas’. It starts off tense and spectral, disembodied, pitch-shifted alien-baby vocals winding around the relentless robo-stomp beat and stiff, brutal guitar stabs, then builds via small, cheeky, skronky increments into a monster, Godzilla trampling an office block and doing the Ace in the rubble. Simple as.
While artists like T Raumschmiere took the schaffel sound semi-live, giving it a funny, sleazy persona in the process, Battles’ take is somewhat more considered and exacting.
Stanier explains: “If you think about it, it’s gone completely full circle. In the Seventies and Eighties, you had to hire a string section if you wanted strings. The Nineties and 2000s came along, and you can make an album on your laptop. These days, the virtual strings are so good that if you tweak it enough you can’t tell. And now that’s getting tired, the sampling and all that. So now we’re a band that’s trying to take that, but to do it live, to write it and create it live on stage. We might be the first band to actually look at it in that kind of way.
“I’m not saying we’re trying to bring it back to the roots of rock’n’roll by playing live. We’re trying to recreate live what is being taken for granted now,” he states, as Konopka adds that, while Battles are not an electronic band, as many think on first listen, there are certainly “traces of electronic ideals” in the way their music is constructed.
Stanier continues, “[‘Atlas’ > started out as, ‘Let’s write something that’ll sound good on a 12-inch and we’ll get someone to remix it on the other side’ [appropriately, Kompakt’s DJ Koze >. It’s also funny because it goes back to that cycle: it’s like we’re being influenced by techno guys who were influenced by rock guys…and there you go. It’s
our take on someone else’s take on something else that happened in the Seventies.”
Stanier’s claim that Battles are the first rock band to approach electronic music in this way is a big one – and it’s certainly a moot point. You could argue that the live performances of LCD Soundsystem and !!!, if not their records, are both exercises in how to filter forms such as Afrobeat, Krautrock, funk and synthpop through a dance consciousness and back out the other side, drawing attention to the live musicianship onstage.
At another extreme, British band Aufgehoben make industrial and experimental electronic music, but as a blinding guitar/drums/synth ensemble, their tight-wound, exhilarating rock an intriguing but not dissimilar counterpoint to that of Battles. The early releases of Animal Collective showed a weird ability to recreate the feel of homemade techno and electronica via incredibly lo-fi materials, and excellent Michigan label Ghostly International navigates the channels between synthpop, songwriting and club beats with aplomb.
Where Stanier is right, however, is that Battles are one of the few bands to illustrate the ongoing conversation between electronic and rock music so literally: they bypass the crass signifiers that ‘indie dance’ often uses to show its allegiance to both camps, choosing instead to explore the more subtle qualities of musical language and vocabulary.
One way in which they work hard to keep that dialogue going is via a presence at electronic festivals, with varying results. While the band’s appearance at Sonar 2005 caused such a tsunami of geek excitement that I had to listen to their set from outside the packed venue, Ty remembers a Belgian festival where, “There was a whole bunch of DJs and we were the only live band.”
“That was like the first time we ever cleared a room,” recalls Konopka. “It’s almost like it was too abrasive. There was too much shit going on.”
Braxton laughs. “We were absolutely unwelcome.”
infinite regress
The following night, at London’s seated, sedate Purcell Room, Battles rattle through Mirrored for an audience composed mostly of music writers and curious industry types.
There’s no question of either a dance party or a cleared room, and Battles give an appropriately huddled, intense but relaxed performance, facing inwards around Stanier’s drumkit as if at a rehearsal, with Braxton, Williams and Konopka moving to their own patterns within each song, prowling on the spot.
In Tim Sancetti’s video for ‘Atlas’, Battles adopt almost identical positions – the difference being that in the video each musician is reflected to infinity via the mirrored walls, ceiling and floor of a glass cube.
It’s the same mirrored box that appears on Mirrored’s sleeve, on which it contains just the band’s instruments: formidably clean and bright, like an architectural scale model. Once the band are in it, though, the room springs into life, the musicians’ reflections bouncing infinitely in time to the music and Stanier’s beats literally wobbling the plexiglass, in the process puncturing the song’s ultra-modern sheen and allowing its mischievous groove to come to the fore.
“We figured if we built this thing we should get the most out of it we can, so we shot the video in it,” Konopka explains of the structure, which measured only 12 feet by 12 feet by eight feet.
“At the same time it was important to us to give a little keyhole glimpse into the workings of the band and how we actually play.”
In contrast to the leafy cover of EP C/B EP, says Konopka, the band wanted to, “Void ourselves of any organic visuals and create this mechanical environment…that could somehow visually match some of the tricks that we do audially. Like the repetitive nature of loops: let’s recreate this infinite hallway of mirrors and reflections playing off the repetitive call and answer stuff in our music. There’s no deep meaning behind it other than matching the music visually – and creating a new identity for ourselves so that we didn’t get pigeonholed as this band that has trees on their covers all the time.”
“On the inside of the cube it was pure reflection: you couldn’t see out at all,” Stanier recalls. “Imagine looking in every direction and seeing yourself, infinitely – it was a panic attack in a box!”
“You could look up and it looked like five stories up and you could see yourself from the bottom again…it was pretty surreal, but it was fun,” smiles Konopka, although the video did leave him with one worry. “Did you see me in the video at all?” he asks. “I’m the one who sticks his butt out when he dances! I didn’t even realise I did that!”
the time the place
Battles are a band who build a hall of mirrors to illustrate loops and layers, and then boing about in it, wiggling their arses, to emphasise the tangibility of what they do, showing you at every step how each ingredient of ‘Atlas’ is added: a chord here,
a stab there. Even at its densest, their music always open-plan; complexity never impedes impact.
This openness is one of Battles’ most potent weapons, and the factor that should see their appeal reaching further than the usual hermetically sealed, clued-up audience for ‘avant-rock’. They’re the kind of band you could come to young, fresh and dissatisfied from mainstream indie, like I did to post-rock in the mid-Nineties, and have your entire aesthetic realigned and broadened – while still feeling as if you understand what’s going on.
It often seems as if the alternative music industry is as stuck as any other in a cycle of novelty and reinvention, and critics should be always be wary of their part in that. But equally, there are times in that cycle where you feel a necessary leap forward taking place; times when the music steps away from its myths and personality cults, dispenses with ‘meaning’ and looks instead at deconstructing and re-examining the form – as on Marnie Stern’s recent ‘Patterns Of A Diamond Ceiling’, on which she literally, audaciously explains her guitar technique as the song builds up. As on Mirrored, where pretty much every track is like a gateway drug into other sounds, other ideas, other green worlds.
It feels like now is one of those times, Battles are one of those bands, and if Warp Records are seeking to reassert their reptuation as pioneering zeitgeist definers, they’ve made a step in the right direction.
Battles themselves, though, rightly eschew such responsibilities. While their name sounds macho – like MCs, soldiers or revolutionaries – theirs is the good-humoured conflict of role-play gamers; or
the exhilarating push and pull of music itself.
Williams muses: “Doing this kind of music, there’s such a fine line between turning into a prog-rock mess, all super-serious and pompous. But if you have a sense of humour it makes all the difference in the world. It’s fun making it, it’s fun for us to play, and it should be fun to listen to as well. I don’t like music that you have to wear glasses and take notes to understand what’s going on.”
“Not that there’s anything wrong with people that wear glasses,” Konopka assures me.
Stanier glances at my notebook: excited pink scribbles, ideas generated at lightning speed by Battles’ music, linked up with arrows, outlined with glitterpen circles. “Or people that take notes.”
This interview originally appeared in Plan B issue 21. |
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