Battles on Ditching Vocals, Echoing Slick Rick and the Art of Food Porn
Stanier: I don’t think there’s anything that wasn’t supposed to happen that turned into this beautiful accident. I think it’s just the ever-so-slight twist. The ever-so-slight shifting of the loop. It makes the song swing way more by just shifting one 16th note. That could be a world of difference. It affects the nature of the song to such a degree that you can’t even talk about it. There were moments like that. I don’t know if there are any things that we’re not supposed to do.
Williams: Which is its own prison.
Having no rules to break?
Williams: Yeah, give us some.
Stanier: The song “Megatouch” is a perfect example. That started with a Dave loop. Dave was like, “This reminds me of…” And the first time I heard it, I was like, “Wow, yeah, it really does. Let’s totally roll with this, but let’s be kinda careful. Don’t go over the deep end with it.” But we were that tasteful with it that we actually pulled it off.
Konopka: None of us are big reggae fans, but I wanted Battles to try and re-create a weird version of how we envision reggae. Even if we tried to do it properly, we probably wouldn’t be able to do it. Our last album was so insular. We were broken up in separate rooms, and we were writing singularly. “Megatouch” was one of the songs where the noodles weren’t totally sticking to the wall yet, and then we went into the live room and jammed for hours.
In addition to being another beautiful collaboration with photographer Lesley Unruh, the album cover could be the most vivid example of food porn ever created, and a great commentary on consumer culture.
Konopka: That is a pretty accurate interpretation. I just wanted to work with a medium that was easily understandable. Chefs are the new rock stars. The Food Network is more popular than MTV. I wanted a medium to imitate our process in a weird way. There’s a story that follows within the cover. Using something visually eye-catching, but also having the subtext of our process as a band.
What type of offspring would a banana and a watermelon actually yield?
Konopka: A kiwi, maybe?
When you bring the songs to life now, how different are the performances from how the songs were recorded?
Williams: To play the songs live, I’ve had to reverse it back to where the songs came from. You can do sleuth work by going back in histories and find how things were the previous step, and the step before that. I’m facing the issue of, what’s live music? Do I resample stuff? The way some of the stuff was made was by feeding an audio signal from one end of a chain to another and playing with the devices in between. But the reality is that somebody’s just pushing a few buttons and turning knobs. For a stage presentation, the modern 21st-century electronic-music answer is, “That is music, and fuck you, and I don’t need to play a piano.”