Courtney Sanders has a chat with Ratatat!
Ratatat are a band steeped in mystique. The pair, Mike Stroud and Evan Mast, recorded their 2004 debut album Ratatat entirely in the solitary confine of their apartment on a powerbook, and in terms of answering questions regarding how they formed, they are, well, ambiguous at best.
An internet rumour was rife that the name Ratatat was gained from an hallucination during an acid trip the pair apparently went on; the hallucination was that of a rat tap dancing, hence rat-a-tat. However, “I’ve never done acid. Never had an interest… citric acid though. Every spring when it starts getting warm out I’ll start buying half gallons of lemonade. I could easily down 6 glasses of lemonade in a session. Even limeade. We don’t really fuck with Arnold palmers though. If you want iced tea, drink iced tea – right?” Apparently mystique is exactly how the pair like it.
Cryptic answers aren’t all that’s creating the genuine weirdness surrounding the pair; their music directly lends itself to portray the Ratatat boys as both anonymous, and mystical music geniuses. From their debut, the pair (now threesome, having added a third member, Jacob Morris) haven’t swerved from creating the elegantly layered and intricately patched together tracks that most alternative musical collectives would kill for. The fact that until recently their music had no lyrical accompaniment only serves to highlight the difficulty in pinning down what gets these guys off musically. “Who knows… I guess I just try to live and experience as much as possible. When it comes time to write songs you bring all of that with you and hope that it gives the music some potency. But I find that I’m most productive and inspired when I can forget about everything else in my life and just get consumed with pure musical ideas. Thinking only of sounds, chords, melodies, beats… you feel the emotions in the music as you’re making it, but its impossible to know where those emotions came from.”
This ‘living’ has included solid bouts of touring with some of the music industry’s heavyweights, including Bjork, Daft Punk, Interpol, Franz Ferdinand, CSS, and The Killers, and unsurprisingly, being surrounded by some of the best musical minds in the business has allowed Ratatat to improve their abilities as songwriters. “We get to see so much music doing this, so when something stands out it’s really inspiring. I saw The Boredoms the other night and it blew my mind. I didn’t turn away from the stage for even a moment during the whole set. It made me want to completely rethink our approach to live shows.”
Rethinking is a concept that Ratatat are familiar with. As well as their two solo albums (Ratatat (2004) followed by their most recent full length release, Classics), the band have remixed a number of artists, particularly Bjork and The Television Personalities, and most infamously The Knife’s track, We Share Our Mothers Health. “Generally we don’t approach bands to remix. The artists or their label will come to us. I wasn’t very familiar with the Shout Out Louds or The Knife when we did those remixes but I felt like we could bring something to those songs. Our approach to remixing is to find a way to tailor the song to our own tastes more than the original. In my mind a lot of the songs we’ve remixed were lacking something and by remixing it we try to make it the song we’d like it to be. I’m not happy with a remix unless I feel it’s a real improvement on the original.”
In its entirety a Ratatat album cries, laughs, jokes and bleeds through the majority of the spectrum of human emotion – from tracks that make you woozy with unadulterated positivism, to those that leave you with an ironic, bitter taste in your mouth. Was any of this preconceived? “No, we didn’t plan much out ahead of time. The record took a long time to make and we had our normal human ups and downs during the course of that, so I’m sure the mood on the record reflects that.”
Again, the mysticism of influences and genuine reference points for a group of revolutionary soundsters is profound, and the randomness and spontaneity for which they employ for their recordings is apparently un-lost in the live performance. “Usually the sound is much more raw and rough around the edges live than it is on the record. Louder too. We do what we can to make the show as exciting as possible – with the visual elements as well as the sound. We’re not a typical rock band but we’re also not a couple of D.J’s standing behind turntables or a laptop. Its somewhere in between, or hopefully somewhere beyond. We always try to add something new to our live show to take it further.”
Ultimately, the band, both in sound, look, and interview, aren’t giving anything away – it’s unashamedly about the music, which for these guys and the boundaries they’re pushing in the field of electronica is probably not a bad thing. Ratatat are returning to our shores to push these in front of Auckland and Wellington audiences at the end of the month, and maybe then we’ll be able to see them for who they truly are, although I doubt it.
Ratatat play Bar Bodega May 1.
