Seven years after taking the indie world by storm with their self-titled debut, Ratatat needed a moment to breathe: it had been nearly a decade of non-stop recording, touring, and recording again, and any semblance of a real life lay buried beneath a mountain of pedals and concert dates.
To recap: Evan Mast and Mike Stroud had parlayed the success of their home-recorded first album into an equally innovative and energetic sophomore album, 2006’s Classics. From there, the two started playing with new tools—the second act of Ratatat’s musical narrative was recorded simultaneously and released two years apart. LP3 (2008) and LP4 (2010) found Evan Mast and Mike Stroud spending less time on their signature guitar slides, opting instead to experiment with a host of keyboard electronica and pedals.
Some great music came out of those sessions, but the resulting tours left the duo exhausted, all but tap-dancing on stage, stamping pedals as they tried to recreate the complex parts and various effects that appeared on the album. By the end, the friends needed a freakin’ break already.
Fast forward five years. Mast and Stroud have returned from whence they came, toning down the pedals and returning to their original toolbelt: pedal steel electric guitars, drum kits, slides. The resulting Magnifique proves the formula hasn’t gone stale. On the contraray—Ratatat’s new album cuts like a knife through the present-day instrumentalists. The songs, jam-packed with melodies and ideas, are a breath of fresh air amidst the brooding swells and sparse percussion that have swallowed up contemporary electronica.
To my ears, the two have rediscovered why they started doing this in the first place and have a great album to show for it. Catching up with Mast and Stroud in their Brooklyn studio last week, prep for the new live show was underway. They were rehearsing the new set for this summer’s shows. A pedal-steel perched in one corner, a harpsichord in another, with a explosion of books, pedals, and guitars strewn in between.
Is this a much different setup than what you were playing for LP4?
Mike Stroud: The live setup is pretty similar, but the visual part we’ve built from the ground up. Lasers, effects, all that stuff.
Evan Mast: In the new songs, we’re back to playing guitars and bass, it’s a lot easier to deal with. That’s the most fun, keeping it simple.
What are you looking forward to playing on this next tour?
E.M.: “Abrasive” is fun, but it’s a tough one to play, just in terms of the guitar work on that song. We’ve been playing it first in the set, trying to get that one out of the way.
M.S.: Yeah, the sound changes really dramatically in that one, we’re triggering a lot of pedals there.
Let’s talk about the making of Magnifique. You were in Long Island, Jamaica, here in Brooklyn…
M.S.: Jamaica was probably the most fun, and the least productive.
E.M.: We were right on the ocean, swimming every day. I think our last trip to the studio upstate was the most focused. We managed to finish a bunch of songs that we hadn’t figured out how to finish for years. It’s the same studio we used for the last two records, in Catskill, New York, a couple of hours upstate.
M.S.: It’s the kind of studio, too, where they just kind of trust us, and leave us to it without an engineer or anything. That’s really important for us, and it’s hard to find a studio that will let you do that.
Is that where you’re most comfortable in terms of workflow, being left alone?
E.M: Yeah, we just do all the engineering. We might have a couple guys come help us set up on the first day, but…
M.S.: I would love to get a lesson in recording drums, though.
E.M: Oh yeah, it’s so hard. We have such a particular taste in how we want the drums to sound.
We were working from this book that goes into incredible detail about how the Beatles recorded.
M.S.: We try to keep it simple—we were working from this book that goes into incredible detail about how the Beatles recorded—it shows you where each mic was positioned and everything.
E.M: They also just had a drum set that sounded amazing. I’ve tried so many times to tune the drums to what I want, I just can’t do it. It takes like two seconds to tune a guitar. But this book is great, because the engineers at EMI were really intense—they had lab coats on, and they wrote everything down. It’s a really cool book, called Recording The Beatles—when we were in Long Island we were reading this a lot, we got some good ideas. They used this thing called VariSpeed a lot, where you can record with the song super slowed down, and when you put it back to normal speed all the sounds are in sync.
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Image via XL Recordings
It must have been really helpful to have all those lab coats around, if you have the time and the team.
E.M: Yeah, we need that. So many times we’ll get really into a song, and have a bunch of weird sounds that we can’t ever find again. It’d be really helpful to have someone just taking pictures of everything.
M.S.: It’s kind of cool though, I feel like because we don’t know exactly what we’re doing, we end up finding sounds that we wouldn’t have otherwise. We’ve always joked about having an intern come in to tune the harpsichord—
E.M: And then leave. [Laughs]
What was going on outside of the music for you during these last four years?
E.M: We definitely took a bunch of breaks, because we had just been touring and recording non-stop for ten years. It was a lot. I moved upstate.
M.S.: I got a hot tub. [Laughs] I kept thinking we were going to get back into it, but we were just looking for a direction for the record for a while.
E.M: We wanted it to feel really cohesive.
It seems like you got there by returning to a a style of songwriting reminiscent of what you were doing in your early days. Was that a conscious choice?
E.M: Yeah, going back to guitar sounds was something we wanted to do. The last two records were very keyboard-y, with a bunch of weird instruments.
M.S.: One of the things we were always thinking about was, “how is this going to work on stage?” It was nice to get back to just strumming a guitar instead of playing a bunch of instruments for five seconds each.
Who’s making music right now that you’re into?
E.M: I like Tame Impala, that record is sounding really good so far.
Your old buddy Kid Cudi is making noise too, he’s got a bunch of stuff coming out. Did he factor into Magnifique at all?
E.M: No, this album is all us. I remember being in the studio with him back in the day though, it was funny experience for us. We always work off in the middle of nowhere, just the two of us. But he had a whole crew, so much weed, it was so different. I couldn’t believe he could get so much done in that environment. He would smoke, write lyrics, sing, all in front of so many people. There’s no way I could ever do that, it was impressive.
M.S.: The first song we did with him already had our part done before we went into the studio. But when we tried to make another song from scratch, it was kind of awkward. We were in a very high-end studio, a lot of label people around—it felt a little forced. That song didn’t feel done, they just put it out. We were working on it at night, and we went home and it was just out like the next day.
What has your experience with labels and record companies thus far?
M.S.: The guy that signed us is still with us, Matt Thornhill. He knows our music so well, we’ve always been able to trust him to pick up on weird little details.
E.M: It’s pretty rewarding—sometimes he can be critical, but he’s usually right, because he’s so familiar with the music.
How about the album’s artwork? The video for “Abrasive” is really amazing, and I like that the cover art followed suit, stylistically. But are you at all afraid that those (mostly) fictional faces are alien souls that you’ve awakened in some tesseract dimension?
M.S.: The label’s afraid of it, we’re not. There was so much frustration there about getting it out because of that—we had to clear a bunch of the names. But we have a label in Europe too, and they didn’t have a problem with it.
E.M: Our European rep didn’t care, but for a minute we were worried we would have to swap it out [in the U.S.]. We put a lot of work into it—but that was really the first time XL pushed us about something like that, they’ve never really been on us like that before. It’s pretty loose.
Ratatat’s Magnifique is out today via XL recordings.
