Most people would feel more comfortable on the window side of a one-way mirror. But the New York foursome Battles, playing at the Troubador Saturday, has decided to submit themselves to scrutinous interrogation in the music video of their first single, “Atlas” off their debut album “Mirrored,” which was released in May.
Guitarist David Konopka served as the video’s art director and together the band built a cube of one-sided mirrors ““ reflective side inward ““ and filmed themselves playing “Atlas” within it.
The band’s aesthetic, like a mix of organic electronic rock and experimental post-rock, is best exemplified by this video. The bright halogen lights that forbid the presence of a single shadow reveal a handful of guys who are playing simple rhythms and avoiding technological complications.
Ian Williams, who before played with true math rockers Don Caballero but left in 2002, formed Battles because he wanted to explore the looping that is responsible for the layered texture of songs.
Rather than running multiple guitar tracks, Battles uses three instruments to produce the layered sound, all of which Williams handles with precision: a guitar, a keyboard and a laptop. As a young musician, Williams was a nervous tapper, now relieving this compulsion with one hand on a guitar and the other on a keyboard.
“It was inspired by the temperament of (composers) Steve Reich or Terry Riley, those minimalist simple patterns repeating again and again,” Williams said. “I did the exact same thing, except your right hand is on the keyboard instead of the fretboard. You’re playing two instruments at the same time, and it creates a sandwich of two tones that blend together to make a richer palette.”
With the frenzied but calculated drumming of John Stanier, previously of Helmet, and Tyondai Braxton’s sometimes heavily distorted vocals, the music sounds dense and vaguely mathematical, an association that Williams is tired of.
“In my understanding of what (math rock) ever meant, it was early ’90s coming from a loud punk, hard-core background but you still broke the rules by importing Rush and King Crimson. That was the thrill of it, that you were playing in (the meter) 7/5,” Williams said. “At the time it felt fresh but it became a stale, ossified thing.”
Battles is too calculated and synthetic sounding to be rock and it is too cerebral to be electronic. Despite the heavy use of distorted pedals and artificial laptop-generated keys, Williams asserts the band is “more of a feeling band in terms of how the music is made. It is not at all a thinking band.”
As Williams explained, each of those amps featured on the album cover is playing a different loop, one from a guitar sample, another from a keyboard sample, and so on. The total effect is a tension absent from straight ahead techno music. None of the loops are prerecorded and should Williams’ hand slip, the song will be irreparably altered. That tension makes the music sound warm, organic and strangely touching.
One song, “Bad Trails,” with one simple, repeating bass line, drawn out cymbal clashes, distorted guitar strums that fade in and out, and fuzzy bird chirping, sounds like a slow, drug-induced traipse through the jungle.
And the single “Atlas” begins with a simple marching beat followed by a repeating notch of reverb. After 16 counts, Braxton begins roughly mumbling indecipherable lyrics to a mean looped guitar riff. It sounds briefly industrial but switches, after another 16 count buildup, into a post-rock, psychotropic fairy tale, with Braxton’s singing a distorted sputtering that sounds as if it has been fast-forwarded without the pitch altered. For all the harshness of the opening segment, the vocal melody is simple and Disney-esque. Strangely, it works, and the video, with Battles performing the song in a one-way mirror box as a camera rotates around them, is something to be seen.
For all the strangeness, Williams, who began his career as a musician playing in the sweaty basements of Pittsburgh, feels that originality is increasingly hard to come by.
He complains that since the democratic upsurge of the music underground with Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” emanating from every teenager’s car stereo, it’s been difficult differentiating Battles in what has become a very consumer-oriented music scene.
“The sense of distinction is now a lot more blurry. In Pittsburgh, there was a defined sense of who was who. It was a bit more isolated, but more creative,” Williams said. “How do you stand outside of the system in a place like Los Angeles?”