You’ve all played in pretty influential bands prior to playing in Battles, has that affected your approach to Battles or have you come to it with a completely fresh approach?
John: With me, the only way that it has come to play in Battles is that I played for a really long time in Helmet, for ten years. But that’s it, playing in that band for ten years obviously caused me to develop a style but from day one of Battles the whole purpose was to do something that none of us had done before. I’d say for the most part our previous bands have little effect apart from maybe a technique.
Ian: Totally. Also, different ideas turn you on 10 years ago. Don Cab and Storm & Stress were fun at those points in time but it’s good to set yourself up in new situations musically. It keeps it fresh and it keeps it honest.
Tyondai: For me there was a real desire to get beyond my past, to create a new sound with new ideas. In a way reacting against what I’ve done before. In Battles, I’m way more interested with ideas of solidified, cohesive song structures. You can never escape yourself completely but you always want to evolve and all of us have come into it with that exploratory philosophy both as individuals and as a collective. My Dad [legendry avant-garde composer Anthony Braxton] obviously had an influence on me but mainly in terms of inspiring me just to be fearless in my approach and work like hell.
How did you guys all meet up?
Tyondai: I’m originally from Connecticut but I met Ian when we were both living in New York and we played around loosely at first for about a year getting used to each other then we met Dave and the idea of it formally becoming a band appeared on the horizon but it was really when John came along that it became clear that we really had something and that was at the end of 2003.
Was there any reason why your initial releases were singles and EP’s only?
John: The honest answer is that the band was beginning to gel and sound like a band so we wanted to tour but we had to have something to tour with so we did Tras the single and two EP’s but they were all actually recorded at the same session. They were released really early on and we had a period of two years of touring and playing together working stuff out as we went along.
Tyondai: All those early releases though were really documents of us struggling to find our sound. There has never been an end goal as in: at the end of the road we want to sound like this or that. The question mark has always been the journey and the EP’s kinda charted that, the new record is us playing around with the sounds established on the EP’s; a more refined version of that early sound.
Is there any reason why you went for Warp Records over here in the UK which is more commonly associated with dance music?
John: Weirdly I think they parallel our growth, that attempt to diversify there sound is sort of the same path we’re on, it just made sense from the get go.
Dave: It was cool, they were looking not to be pigeonholed and that was exactly the same thing we were looking for, we’re both evolving in tandem.
How did you hook up with DJ Koze for the remix on the new single?
John: My girlfriend lives in Cologne so I just bumped into him over there, we were mixing the album and it was actually all just done over the phone but it worked out really well I think.
There seem to be a lot more vocals on the new record, what’s up with that?
Tyondai: I know from the outset that this band has been viewed as an ‘instrumental’ outfit but internally we never saw it that way, it made sense on the EP’s to be more reserved in a way as we were still trying to sculpt our sound, there are vocals on there but on the new record I thought it would be cool to introduce that element more heavily and play with the stereotypical vocal structure. Take it on in a Battles mode.
Do you think you’d ever write a pop song?
Dave: I thought we already had!
John: I don’t think that this band will ever on purpose be that direct in terms of a focus prior to writing something. If that happens it would happen naturally, we don’t write in such a pre-meditated fashion.
Ian: We are only really shooting for the same thing anyone is shooting for from the Flaming Lips to whoever, just to write a good song. Something like Stockhausen can be like pop to me, just the catchiest thing ever.
Tyondai: The immediate association with any of the labels like avant-garde or even something as simple as just being instrumental is alienation. Anything can be catchy or infectious but if it is presented in that way of being beyond you then obviously it can alienate, we hope that our music can have the characteristics of that experimental stuff we like but remain inviting.
Does it piss you off being branded indulgent muso’s?
John: I can understand the average kinda dude thinking that but you can’t get mad at them at them for it. That said there will always be a part of being an ‘artist’ that will be very selfish, to dedicate my whole life to pleasing myself and showing people what my self-indulgence creates is kind of weird. But that isn’t the goal of our music.
Tyondai: It’s not like we sit there when we record saying: I can’t wait to write this song just to make people feel weird and alienate them.
Can I just say that listening to the new record made me feel terrified, I felt like I’m a goblin inside a green castle living in the middle of a lake of psycho’s.
Dave: That’s pretty much what we were going for.
Tyondai: That’s cool you get that, some other people have said it sounds really happy so I guess for it provoke such different reactions is cool.
John: Some guy even said that the vocals sound like sped up Kanye West samples.
Would you say it’s more accessible than your early EP’s?
John: Well it has vocals, which immediately give people something to latch on to.
Do you think maybe some people came to the new single and album because you guys don’t subscribe to any generic band type or conform to any genre and seem to shy away from any sense of image?
John: People always kinda want something familiar like that AC/DC beat or whatever and we don’t really give them that. In general our stuff needs a few listens and the overall reaction we get from a lot of the ‘average’ people that we play our music to is: I like it but I don’t know why. We aren’t making instant music, the kind of bands that make that sort of music you gobble the record up like candy but you aren’t gone be listening to that shit in a years time, it’ll be your favourite record for a week then you’ll throw it on the pile and never listen to it again. The records that last demand your effort and they will last over time.
Ian: For sure, I still listen to Sister and love it.
Tyondai: The flip side of that is like a House record or something that you want to smack you round the face immediately, you listen to that with a different head on though, it’s not really for us to say that one record is more valid than the other or that every band has to be hyper-creative all the time.
Dave: Maybe it has something to do with that weird questing impulse to find the new thing that is interesting. The internet has changed the way it used to work, when I was younger it was either what my brother listened to or maybe if you were lucky a cool record shop in the town you were in maybe buying up records on a certain label like SST or whatever and from there maybe finding a magazine like MRR. Now you can just Google it and almost instantaneously find out what we’re all about. The kid that is bored of Nickleback in the Midwest now just has this whole network of connectivity that he can explore.
The video is cool what’s the deal with that?
Tyondai: It’s weird to me how much people are freaking out over it, it’s a great video but the single hasn’t even been released yet and people are going crazy over it on Youtube.
John: It’s weird for me 'cos I’m so fucking old I’ve seen the whole video thing come full circle from it being a thing of no importance to MTV making it more important than the actual record then it kind of died down when MTV became a network and videos were hardly shown but with things like Youtube the video is out there again.
David: If it was solely an MTV culture then there would be little point a band like us making a video cos it would never get fucking shown but the internet has made it a valid medium again. It almost increases the incentive for people to listen to the actual song; they can sit at their computer and watch this cool little thing that has been created to go along with it.
Ian: It’s the same with the single, releasing mp3’s and stuff.
Where did the name come from?
Ian: It looks good on paper.
Tyondai: It can just be interpreted in a bunch of different ways.
What do you hate at the moment?
Tyondai: Err…Turbulence?
Dave: I hate that I’ve hardly answered a fucking question.
Ian: I hate coming over here and being served Czech beer, what the deal with that?
John: And I hate coming to London and never getting fish and chips in newspaper. I want that shit wrapped in newspaper.
They don’t really do that anymore. Have you been attacked by instrumental-prog-mathcore groupies since you got here?
John: Shit yeah… Not really.
How about guys?
Tyondai: I guy did try and kiss me at ATP.
Who do you think will succeed Bush?
John: I have a feeling that Gore is gonna pop up out of leftfield.
Do you think that music and politics can be done at once?
Ian: Not really, even when I listen to all those old English bands it just sounds funny to me, like: ah…they’re singing about the dole. It just doesn’t really sit so well music and politics.
Dave: Try telling that to Bono and Eddie Vedder.
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