Battles Aren't "Show-Off Musicians", They're Just Keeping Their Music To The Point

“This band has always shifted its shape,” says Battles’ Ian T Williams. “We always do that, we always knew that. Finding ourselves in new situations keeps it fresh, while still staying somewhat consistent to what it’s always been.”

For their fourth album, Juice B Crypts, Battles have, again, found a new shape. After starting out life as a quartet, Battles are now a core duo: Williams on guitar (and all manner of gear), John Stanier on drums. For the album, the pair have enlisted a whole host of contributors, including Shabazz Palaces, Tune-Yards, Xenia Rubinos, Sal Principato of disco-punk legends Liquid Liquid, and Jon Anderson of prog-rock icons Yes.

Working with vocalists “takes pressure off the music", Williams offers. "When you’re making all-instrumental music, it really quickly can become that you’re trying to be a virtuoso, or that you’re writing ten-minute songs that, y’know, ‘take you places’. We did a pretty good job on this record of not being epic, not being show-off musicians, but of keeping things concise and to the point.”

Making the album – the first since the departure of longtime bassist Dave Konopka –  felt different, but Williams believes every album he’s ever made, from Don Caballero through Storm & Stress and Battles, has been a wholly different thing. “I’ve always just been trying to make music,” he says, with a chuckle, “and the people around me change a bit. They come and go, but I’m still pursuing the same thing.”

Williams is speaking from Santiago, Chile. Battles are there on a night off, having been forced to cancel a show in Quito, Ecuador due to anti-government protests. Williams had an early taste of travelling to foreign shores, and countries in flux, when he spent a stint of his childhood living in Malawi. “As a kid, it’s like, God: no TV, no ice-cream, no toys,” he recounts. “That just meant that we had to learn to make our own fun. When I came back to the United States in [sixth grade], I realised that I had been living this much freer life.”

Williams took piano lessons growing up, but picked up the guitar, and punk rock, as a teenager. Despite the fact that his musical history has been lauded for its complexity – half of the definitive math-rock albums involve Williams – he still thinks of himself as a self-taught, punk rock musician. “I’ve always felt like an outsider,” says Williams. “I’ve always approximated my own way of doing things, which is sometimes correct, sometimes pretty awkward. I think, in some ways, that’s the reason I’ve been able to keep making music...

“I’ve always approximated my own way of doing things, which is sometimes correct, sometimes pretty awkward."

“I might have a few techniques that I’m using to generate sounds, each record. I sort of can’t summon the energy to repeat that again on another record. It just seems too exhausting, and not a thing that would make me happy. I do better when I find myself searching, and having to be in a fresh place, especially one where I’m not really aware of the rules. It’s a little scarier sometimes [but] the results can be more honest in the end, rather than what would be the product of you repeating your formula.”

For Battles' new duo line-up, both on stage and on Juice B Crypts, Williams has been pushing at the interface between man and machine. “I split my duties between the Elektron Octatrack, Eurorack modules, and Ableton Live,” he explains. “In a certain way, I try to stay traditional: I’m still playing guitar, like people have for centuries, working with chords, and scales, and within certain melodic rules, basic musical theory that would be, like, the same things The Beatles used. But I’m sending my audio to, say, a filter that’s going up and down syncopated with BPM, or playing into a looper than turns on and records for two beats every eight measures, and then throws that back at you. I’ll pre-program those things to happen, but it’s sort of like, as the human musician, I’m playing the guitar or the keyboard. But then I’m letting the sound go out there and get mangled. That’s really the easy word for it: sound mangling. ”