Battles on Ditching Vocals, Echoing Slick Rick and the Art of Food Porn
Battles create mostly instrumental music heavy enough for metalheads, nuanced enough for jazz cats and weird enough to pull in all sorts of fans from the fringes. From 2007’s Mirrored up to the present, the New York art-rockers’ surprisingly hooky, electronic-tweaked-to-sound-organic (and vice versa) creations have also soundtracked ads for Honda and the FIFA 12 video game, and shown up on the Twilight: Eclipse soundtrack. Currently a three-piece featuring guitarist-keyboardist Ian Williams, guitarist-bassist Dave Konopka and drummer John Stanier, Battles will release La Di Da Di (Warp), their first album in four years, on September 18th.
Unlike 2011’s Gloss Drop, which incorporated guest vocalists on songs like the spastic pop exploration “Ice Cream” (featuring Matias Aguayo) and the driving industrial-rocker “My Machines” (featuring synth-pop vet Gary Numan), this record lets beats, loops, glitches and effects provide its voice. Like dividing cells, the patterns of the songs morph naturally — albeit, occasionally drastically. Over head-nodding krautrock rhythms, cascading album opener “The Yabba,” premiering here, exhibits the trio’s uncanny ability to find clarity in complexity.
Recorded at the Rhode Island studio Machines with Magnets in late 2013 and early 2014, La Di Da Di finds Battles arm-wrestling the urge to repeat previous efforts — and winning. Through the magic of Skype, Rolling Stone simultaneously reached Williams and Konopka at their respective Brooklyn homes, and Stanier in Berlin to discuss food-porn-as-cover-art, La Di Da Di‘s Slick Rick–related title, and the inherent problems with trying to be futurists.
A recent Instagram post suggests that the music video you just filmed in Barcelona takes place at the Star Wars Cantina.
Stanier: Riiiiight.
Konopka: The music video has nothing to do with the Star Wars Cantina. That’s just our manager trying to…
Stanier: …be funny.
What can you share about the video?
Konopka: It was directed by Roger Guàrdia. He’s one of the members of the CANADA production group, who produced our “Ice Cream” video. We went back to them to collaborate but with a different director this time. Those guys do awesome work.
How do you pronounce the title of your third album, and how did you come up with it?
Williams: Ladi-dadi.
Stanier: Like the Slick Rick song.
Williams: The one idea behind it was that it’s an instrumental record, so what words describe instrumental music? Using “la la la” — like generic voicings for singing — using this to describe instrumental music. It’s sort of a playful, whimsical thing that takes pressure off of us by saying, “We’re not overwhelming you with heaviness or anything.”
Stanier: Dave, I remember you bringing it to the table really late at night when we were at a bar in Berlin. I instantly liked it because I thought of Slick Rick. I’m not into a heavy-handed explanation on it.
When did you know you were going back to an all-instrumental approach for this album?