WNUR 89.3 FM » Blog Archive » Interview with Battles’ Ian Williams

June 14th, 2012 by Denise Lu

Ian Williams - Battles live @ Villa Ada by Flavia_FF,/></a> </div></p><p><div>Used gratefully under a C<a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/">reative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic License.</a> Photo by Flickr user <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/mistressf/">Flavia_FF</a>.</div></p><p><em>Last month, Denise spoke with Ian Williams, guitarist/keyboardist of math rock group Battles, for WNUR’s <a href="http://airplay.wnur.org/">Airplay</a>. They discussed some of the artistic collaborations that fed into the group’s latest album, </em><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/gloss-drop-bonus-track-version/id436917460">Gloss Drop</a><em>; the state of the local scene in Chicago; and about the altogether fuzzy definition of “math rock.” Battles will be playing at the <a href="http://www.bottomlounge.com/shows/battles-aesthetic-anaesthetic">Bottom Lounge</a> tonight (June 14) with opener <a href="http://anaestheticanaesthetic.bandcamp.com/">An Aesthetic Anaesthetic</a>.</em></p><p><strong>I know it’s a very different sound on stage as opposed to your studio albums, but there’s a lot of similarities for live shows; I’m wondering how much of it is planned versus improvised?</strong></p><p>It’s planned, you know, but sometimes you kind of plan little pockets where things aren’t really that scripted. It’s more like you kind of know some of the events that are going to happen, like eventually the drummer is going to hit his cymbal or eventually somebody’s going to start a new riff or something. So you’re kind of waiting for things to happen, so it’s not like blind improvisation or anything like that.</p><p><strong>And of course you’re working with a massive amount of gear on stage and with one of your members, Tyondai [Braxton] gone, and the additional LCD screens, what was the change like and was it hard to adapt to?</strong></p><p>Um, a little bit. To be honest, when we started last spring, when we started playing shows after we finished our record, it was tricky because we were so unprepared in some ways because, first of all, it was a studio album. It was the first time <a href="http://www.discogs.com/Battles-Gloss-Drop/release/2869009"target="_blank"><em>Gloss Drop</em></a> was really written in the studio, and when you do that, if you ever ask yourself, “well, how am I actually going to replicate this on stage?” and you just kind of go, “ah, we’ll worry about that later,” and you don’t really think about it. And so you make this record, put it together, you say it sounds good.</p><p>So the question of actually standing there, generating the material in real time in front of people, it’s a different thing to figure out. And we didn’t have much time to figure that out. On top of that, we were running the studio shit, trying to find a way to do that stuff for the first time. We had asked Matias Aguayo, who sang the song “<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAbc5yhbBFQ" target="_blank">Ice Cream</a>,” if he wanted to come on tour with us for an entire year, and he said okay. So we thought we had this lead singer, and then something popped up in his life unexpectedly, and he couldn’t do it. So two weeks before the show started, I remember it was like, “oh, Matias isn’t coming, so you don’t have a singer, and then it became like, ah, fuck.” That’s when we put the video thing together. “Quick! Throw a video camera in front of Gary Numan.” It came like that, so by the seat of our pants, it took us a little while to actually learn how to do it on stage.</p><p><strong>Speaking of <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4D7RzUtFEps" target="_blank">Numan</a>, I heard that of all the collaborators, he was kind of the fantasy choice. What was it like working with him?</strong></p><p>Page 1 of 3 | <a href=

Posted in Interview | No comments

Previous post: Wesley Willis – “I Whupped Batman’s Ass”
Next post: This is Hell: Chicago’s best morning show!