Battles Can't Make French Fries But They Can Roast Potatoes

Battles guitarist Dave Konopka has a preoccupation with food. Formerly head designer at a New York publishing house, Konopka is the band's de facto art director, responsible for conceiving and producing their album cover art. For Battles' third album, La Di Da Di, Konopka worked with photographer Lesley Unruh to create a high-gloss chain of edibles, trailing one into another. He was also deeply amused by the thought of a banana penetrating a watermelon. 

Recorded in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, La Di Da Di is Battles' first wholly instrumental studio album. Their first album, Mirrored (2007), featured the tweaked vocal melodies of Tyondai Braxton. Braxton left the band during the writing sessions for Gloss Drop (2011) and was replaced on that album with a series of guest vocalists. For La Di Da Di, the remaining Battles line-up (including keyboardist Ian Williams and drummer John Stanier) returned to basics, rediscovering their form as a purely instrumental act.

"We can't make French fries 'cause we don't have a fryer … But we can roast potatoes and they taste delicious."

Konopka explains the transition with a food analogy. "We can't make French fries 'cause we don't have a fryer. None of us can sing! Why try and force the issue? But we can roast potatoes and they taste delicious," he smiles. "We just started writing melodically and texturally and using all of the elements we use to make our music, and it was a good step for us. Another album full of guest vocals would have been Gloss Drop Part Two." Konopka pauses for a second and chuckles. "I actually really don't care about vocals at all, that's the subtext. That's Dave's real talk." 

La Di Da Di was written piecemeal, over the wire. Konopka and Williams worked on loops and textures in New York and sent them to Stanier, who had relocated to Berlin, so that he could add beats before flying home for the recording sessions at Machines With Magnets studios. The band has described an interesting tension in their writing and recording process, where the original feeling of a piece can be dramatically overhauled by the competitive, contrapuntal layers that another band member provides. The complexity of Battles' music is hard won — they have to negotiate every line — yet the end result is an organic flow that fires up your neurotransmitters.

Sometime between Mirrored and La Di Da Di, EDM happened. In part because of its visceral effect and partly because of the insistent rhythmic patterns, there seems to be a relationship between Battles' math rock and the world of dance music. Considering this proposal, Konopka returns to food metaphors. "There's a relationship based on technology in the sense that the really good Italian restaurant down the street is using the same tomatoes as the really crappy Italian restaurant on the other side of the street… Obviously we're the crappy Italian restaurant in this scenario," he laughs.   

"I guess we're all swimming in the same pool, learning about new things and living an interconnected lifestyle. It's all the same shit. But the difference is that an EDM artist could jump directly into the world of electronics and feel like that is their existence, whereas for us it's like 'We're humans, we use the human tomatoes!' We like to maintain that human versus machine dichotomy. That's what keeps us engaged. The rock band aspect is way more important and interesting to us than the electronics could ever be."