The Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and TV on the Radio may have defined the fertile New York music scene of the early 2000s, but none stood the test of time like Ratatat. While their contemporaries turned the city into a hipster capital, the Brooklyn duo managed to outlast them all through an indie-informed take on electronic music.
Previously a touring guitarist for emo stars Dashboard Confessional, Ratatat’s Mike Stroud recalls falling in love with software when he was a college student at New York’s Skidmore College.
“I was really excited about the range of sounds you could hear on records by people like Aphex Twin, Boards of Canada and Daft Punk,”he says. “Instead of easily being able to identify a guitar, bass and drums, the instruments could be anything. When I first started listening to electronic music I couldn’t even fathom how it was created. That mystery intrigued me.”
For 15 years, Stroud has scratched that curiosity with college friend and producer Evan Mast. He credits Ratatat’s sound to the members’ divergent musical pasts.
“Moving into electronic music opened up a lot of possibilities that were really exciting,” he says. “At the same time, I really love a lot of more traditional forms of music making. Ratatat lets us exercise both sides. We can create really unique and unidentifiable sounds in the studio, but also combine that with traditional instruments like guitar.”
As New York became the focal point of a Strokes-driven underground musical renaissance, Ratatat benefited from the resulting attention. While Stroud notes, “We never really felt part of that particular scene because we were doing instrumental music,” Ratatat toured with Interpol early in their careers and were quickly signed to respected British label XL Recordings (home to The Prodigy, The White Stripes and Adele).
Able to appeal to multiple music scenes, they’ve toured with indie stars (The Killers, Franz Ferdinand, Vampire Weekend) and electronic icons (Björk, Daft Punk). They’ve remixed The Notorious B.I.G. and were recruited by Kid Cudi to produce a pair of songs on his Kanye-approved
debut.
A live favorite, Ratatat’s triumphant night-closing set at last year’s Coachella Festival heralded not only the end of a four-year hiatus, but also the arrival of their fifth album, Magnifique. Stroud admits “It was a bit difficult to make because we had set the bar pretty high for ourselves,”but seems content about the disc, citing Queen’s Brian May and unheralded guitar pioneers Alvino Ray, Buddy Merrill and Pete Drake as sonic influences.
Written and recorded over four years in Jamaica and New York, Magnifique topped the US Billboard Electronic Music charts. Ratatat are now bringing the disc around the globe with an extensive world tour that includes a six-city Vice-sponsored jaunt across China that stops off in Beijing (May 13 - Yugong Yishan), Shanghai (May 14 - MAO Livehouse) and Guangzhou (May 21 - T:Union)
Stroud raves about their last China tour, noting that footage of his trips to Chengdu and Chongqing were included in the music video for Magnifique’s lead single ‘Cream on Chrome.’
While admitting that Ratatat won’t be able to bring their “whole bag of tricks to China,” he promises that they take their exemplary live reputation seriously.
“Our show involves a lot of visual elements, so it becomes much more than an audio experience,” he says. “We’ll certainly have video projections, where each track has its own video synched with the music.”
Ratatat 2016 China Tour:
Beijing: May 13, 9-11.30pm, RMB120-150. Yugong Yishan.
Shanghai: May 14, 9-11.30pm, RMB120-150. MAO Livehouse, see event listing.
Chengdu: May 17, 8.30pm, RMB80-120. Little Bar.
Chongqing: May 18, 8.30pm, RMB80-120. Jianguo Livehouse.
Wuhan: May 20, 8.30pm, RMB80-120. VOX.
Guangzhou: May 21, 8.30-10.30pm, RMB80-120. T:Union.
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