Ratatat
LABEL: Beggars Group, XL ||| PHOTOGRAPHY: James Kendi
I wonder if anyone else has secretly taken a RATATAT song and recorded their own vocal track over it. I did. In 2004 I had just returned from a literal mind-blowing journey in Peru and I was oddly placed in the basement of my ex-neighbors house in the suburbs of Nowhere, Kansas. I laced that track. I laced it real nice with a shure 57 microphone. But I never sent the song to RATATAT. I’ve only listened to the song a handful of times and I played it for two of my brothers. It’s one of those songs for the vault. It’s my little secret.
So those gentlemen from RATATAT just sent me LP3. And they asked me to write their thingy-thang. Already I’ve found another sizzling track on this new one that I am POSITIVELY going to lace with voices, and WITHOUT their permission. Which makes me wonder why I’m busy typingaway here when I could be lacing that track. But this is a favor for RATATAT. [Read about LP3 here]
I suppose I’m returning the favor that they did for me in the Summer of Sunshine, 2007. I was fresh off of Panther Mountain, wearing hot pink soccer shorts and LOTS of coconut oil, and those guys from RATATAT came over to the studio I was at in Catskill, NY. It was actually just a big old house full of organs and amplifiers and all the other crazy sound makers you could possibly want to make a happening happen. Called “Old Soul”, the mansion was haunted. A really ancient president of the United States had lived and died in there. That dude Uncle Sam, like the real guy from the posters, he grew up next door. It’s the sort of place you definitely want to make some smoke, burn some sage and stay up all night. Every night if possible.
So the two boys from RATATAT, Evan (beat maker) and Mike (melody keeper) shows up and I make a big salad with cashews on top and they decline my offer for coconuts. In this time I’m eating like a little bird. I was feeding them their meals for the whole weekend, but not serving enough food. Those guys are so polite that they would just sneak away from the studio and find a quick bite around town instead of simply asking me for more to eat.
I showed them the ethereal pyramid I had set up around the studio using quartz crystal capstones. They didn’t roll their eyes and they actually looked curious during my ramblings about the pyramids. I told them what I know.
So we got right to work. They laced some of my tracks, supplied me with beats, and helped arrange some things for my new album WHITE ARK. It was thrilling to watch the two of them at work in the studio. What stood out the most to me was their silent intelligence, their telepathic capacities. I observed again and again how Evan and Mike would download the contents of my mind perfectly, and then communicate in between themselves with minimal cues like eye gestures or crotch clenches, and soon enough they were filling the room with swirling guitar and organ parts, giving my song skeletons a brand new nervous system and all their soft tissues. We would have long improv sessions in the night, pulsing emerald lights from the corners of the crystal pyramid.
The energy flowed perfectly and the boys were digging Old Soul so much they decided to record what would become LP3 there. They booked 40 days and 40 nights, and while they weren’t quite fasting in the desert, due to their auspicious encounter with the Egyptian rug dealer Mumtaz Khan (see track 11 of LP3) in downtown Catskill, they laced the joint with even more crystal pyramids.
—White Flight, 2008
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What I absolutely appreciate about RATATAT is that they encourage music lovers to get involved with the music they listen to. For this band it is about the experience of actively listening which is why asking someone to layer their own vocals to their tracks creates a sense of musical connectivity!