Interview: Battles, the math-pop on a ménage à trois2011-08-11 10:37:00

Amazing on stage and unstoppable in interview, Battles have definitely recovered from the departure of their former singer, Tyondai Braxton. With Drop Gloss, their second album (and first as a trio), Ian, Dave and John easily occupy the "sonic space" with the power of a "boxer of 300 pounds". Backed up by audacious and nebulous featurings (Matias Aguayo, Gary Numan, Kazu Makino, Yamantaka Eye), they deliver a "pink blob" which they themselves are unsure of the meaning.

We met them on June 30th at the Cabaret Sauvage for the festival ME.002 before meeting them this weekend in La Route du Rock 2011.

Interview by Ariane Gruet / Editing by Thomas Folliot / Produced by Anousonne Savanchomkeo  

Battles: Ian Williams (guitar/keyboards), John Stanier (drums), Dave Konopka (bass/guitar)
Album: Gloss Drop on Spotify and you can buy it here
Label: Warp

Read the full interview below:

Grandcrew.com: It's been two years since your first album came out. What happened between 'Mirrored' and 'Gloss Drop'?
Ian Williams: We toured for like two years on ‘Mirrored’ so after that, that would take us to two years ago. We hold up in a practice place in Brooklyn and we started writing, it was a little slow, schedules were conflicting a bit, we finally got into the studio last year, and there were some obstacles in the studio and we finally finished this past January

Grandcrew.com: After your singer Tyondai Braxton left, did you keep some sketches or did you decide to just go back to the start?
John Stanier: Humm, I don’t think we had an entire record’s worth of material, and think we had maybe a third but we weren’t entirely happy with that so it kind of worked out to be a good thing in a weird way. So we took some elements from what we already had, but for the most part we pretty much reset everything and just re-did an entire album in a third of the time actually. So it worked out pretty good, in our favor I think.

Grandcrew.com: How did you feel at the moment?
Ian Williams: Were we sad?
Dave Konopka: I wasn’t sad, I was mad, glad and bad but I wasn’t sad. Frustrated I don’t know, frustrated run with those. You know the setbacks that we experienced were just like, there were so many times that we were like a boxer, a 300 pound boxer kept  getting punched in the head but kept standing up until we finally won the fight. To me it was just kind of like… Did you ask if we were sad?
Ian Williams: I did !
Dave Konopka: You asked?
Ian Williams: Yeah
Dave Konopka: Who’s conducting this interview?
Ian Williams: You are

Grandcrew.com:  Is 'Gloss drop' way more upbeat than 'Mirrored’?
Dave Konopka: It wasn’t a conscious effort for us to be just like ‘we need to sit down and make an upbeat album because everything sucks right now’. We just knew that we kind of just rose above the whole situation, just not to make it evident that nobody wants to hear out the dirty laundry on an album you know, so it was like, let’s just do this and move on. It was all about moving for us so part of that is just feeling free and happy and excited again as a band. It was that fresh breathe of life that came back into our existence as a band.

It’s pretty easy for us to fill up the sonic space ‘cause we can generate a lot of noise

Grandcrew.com: When you were on stage or in the studio, how was the “after Tyondai” situation? Did you have to change your habits?
Ian Williams: You naturally do things in a different way when you think of yourselves as a trio, as opposed to a quartet. We have decided that maybe repurpose our roles a little bit in the band and well, it’s still pretty easy for us to fill up the sonic space I would say, ‘cause we can all generate a lot of noise. So I guess the answer is ‘yes’ and ‘no’ because we always had a problem when there were four of us, creating enough space for the other person. So it’s a little easier now.

Grandcrew.com: Was there still an empty space with vocals? Is that why there are so many featurings on this album?
Dave Konopka: I don’t think that's what we were intending when we asked those vocalists to join, I think that the threshold of Battles’ limitation were always kind of ‘We can be as hard as we want to be’ but I think it’s just balancing off in a tasteful way ‘cause I feel like the album is a little bit more driving and upbeat. There’s a lot more energy there for the new album ‘Gloss Drop’, but we reinterpret the songs live like we’re kind of like animals in a cage that people are watching and there’s  this other level of energy that come out of the songs.

Grandcrew.com: Is there a possibility that Battles could become exclusively an instrumental band?
Ian Williams: I think vocals for us are always sort of thing we have to work around even when our last singer used to do it, he treated it electronically and everything so. We never used vocals in a straight way and even when now we have straight singings on this record, but at the same time, it’s very much like conceptually and not straight because the people aren’t in the band who actually sings. So it’s still like I can have this dual existence on the issue instrumental/vocal and I feel we can be both at the same time.

Grandcrew.com: What is the meaning of Gloss Drop's title and cover?
Dave Konopka: It was just a concept of us as a document of recorded band and as a live band and making two different forms of art using the same material, control one substance and making the other one organic. And we just want the organic one for the album, for the artwork. It's just something that is in our creative process, this is not something we can understand. But it’s totally just a pink blob, there’s a lot of meaning behind it but it's just some sculptures I've made, nothing else. But on the other hand, we just want to create something that’s like iconic that you can only associate with Battles. You don’t see too many pink blob trying to look pretty out there, that much. The same goes for the album title, just something you can associate to Battles.
Ian Williams: Yeah, shiny color on the surface, but drop is not also a clean thing. Hot and cold. Smooth and rough. Salty and sweet.

Grandcrew.com: Are the titles related to the songs in any way?
Ian Williams: Yeah, they have some links with the tunes I think. I think Africastle, the song sounds like a castle. No. For example, Wall Street, we have this one little section which sounds like successful people music like if you listen to it, we’ll be very successful, so we called it Wall Street. And it’s hard to ever say that there is always a meaning to instrumental songs because the meaning is always kind of abstract, it’s never the story of a boy who likes a girl or something like that. And actually, even the songs with singing, I would say that the song Ice Cream or the song Sundome, the lyrics are just sort of personal sounds that those singers are making. They’re not really language that the other people of the world would know. So, again meaning. But you know, Ice Cream, Dave said this song sounds like Ice Cream, so we said all right.

Bonus tracks