Getting to Know... Discovery

If Vampire Weekend and Ra Ra Riot were considered buzzy, then Discovery could be described as fizzy—the musical equivalent of opening up a just-shaken bottle of orange soda on a hot summer day. Rostam Batmanglij (Vampire Weekend's keyboardist/multi-instrumentalist) and Wes Miles (Ra Ra Riot’s lead singer) comprise this long-running side project, which makes sticky-sweet synth-pop laced with gauzy vocal harmonies that float over the frenetic romp of 808 bass lines and hi-hat beats. The friends have been composing tunes sporadically since 2005 (before either of their respective indie-rock bands had even formed) and will finally share them with the world on Discovery's full-length debut, LP, due July 7. 

On LP, Batmanglij and Miles take a stylistic approach that feels incongruous at one moment, then entirely cohesive the next. It’s a project they can laugh about, but it’s not a joke. It’s a dance record drummed up by guys who don’t go dancing too often, an album with sonic touchstones that hopscotch from dub-step to Ne-Yo, vintage Janet Jackson to Super Mario Bros. To say the very least, it’s not what you might expect. Paste recently chatted with the two genre chameleons, talking about everything from misconceptions about Auto-Tune to Japanese public transportation.

Paste: I understand that Wes and [Vampire Weekend singer] Ezra Koenig grew up together and played in bands. Could you explain the Ra Ra Riot/Vampire Weekend band-member connections, going back to grade school?

Wes Miles: Yeah, Ezra and I, we grew up in Glen Ridge, N.J. and played in bands together since 5th grade or so. And, you know, all different kinds of bands. And then when we went to college—we, like, played a few times when we came back at the same time for like Thanksgiving or winter break. We’d be, like, recording a little bit. [Then] he told me about some friends of his [at Columbia] that were making music, so I met Rostam that way.

Paste: So how did the idea for Discovery emerge and how long has it been fermenting over the years?

Rostam Batmanglij: It’s been like four years. [Laughs]

Paste: Since [Wes] and Ezra had been working together for so long, was there any reason that drew the two of you together?

Miles: Well, I mean, it’s more like, when we met, [Rostam and I] had different things that we had and common. Like Rostam and I bonded over our love for making vocal harmonies, so that encouraged us to work together.

Batmanglij: I think also we would have been making music [with] probably the three of us, but I think Ezra went on tour with The Dirty Projectors that summer. Was that right?

Miles: Yeah, I think that’s true.

Batmanglij: Yeah, we probably would have all been recording together, but Wes and I were both in the New York area.

Paste: About your album—you’ve definitely played with Auto-Tune a bit, and Auto-Tune’s become a bit of a hot-button issue lately. Jay-Z sort of just read its death certificate. How long have you been playing with that vocal tool, and why you decide to use it so much on the album?

Batmanglij: Well, I think with regards to Jay-Z—I think he’s saying that if you’re a rapper, and you wanna come across as hard, then Auto-Tune’s not the way to do it.

Paste: So you think that probably doesn’t apply to you?

Batmanglij: No, I think we’re clear of Jay-Z’s indictment. And, if not, I’d let him know the next time I see him. I actually did meet Jay-Z once! He was very relaxed and confident [Laughs]… I think Auto-Tune’s something—you hear it in Arabic music, you hear it Indian music, you hear it everywhere, all around the world in all kinds of music.  And I think in this past few years, it became this very common pop thing. You hear it in its extremes. But, I mean, if you listen to Avril Lavigne’s “Complicated,” there’s tons of Auto-Tune on that, but you’re not supposed to think there’s Auto-Tune on it.

Miles: I think we just wanted to use it as an effect, as a texture. It’s got a certain quality to it that can make it sound more interesting.  It can make it sound bad too.

Batmanglij: [Laughs] Yeah, definitely.

Miles: If you use it the right way and you use it on the right music, then it can add to a certain feel, which is important if you’re going for something specific.

Batmanglij: In some ways [I think we like] Auto-Tune for the same reason we like pixilated images. Because it’s creating these jagged lines in music. It’s taking something smooth and turning it into stair-steps, literally, stair-steps of pitch.

Miles: Kind of going with that visual analogy for the Auto-Tune stuff, when you’re recording with Reason [software], Rostam, you were saying the other day that if it looks a certain way, it’s gonna sound a certain way. It’s a kind of analog to each other.

Batmanglij: Yeah, definitely… Like, [I’m] almost trying not to trust my fingers and like my muscle memory, so that we could come up with something new. But some of the stuff, like the chord progressions, were written on guitar or piano.

Paste: You also seem to be pulling from R&B and dance music on this album, and I was curious if you listen Top 40 radio, where you’d hear that kind of music a lot. How much Usher and Akon, for instance, make it onto your iTunes as opposed to your indie rock contemporaries?

Miles: Definitely Usher. I don’t know if we have any Akon.

Batmanglij: I have one song of his. It’s called “Africa.” Apparently he’s Senegalese. I didn’t know that.

Miles: What?

Batmanglij: I didn’t know that Akon was Senegalese.

Miles: Oh, I had no idea.

Batmanglij: Yeah, I’ve heard some Akon. I like it. But yeah, we try to pay attention to what’s on Top 40 radio.

Miles: Well, since it’s like kind of a recording project, we had a lot of different limitations. Like we wouldn’t have to think about how many harmonies and vocal takes that would need to sound realistic in like the live setting. That was something we took a lot of liberties with… And also, we wanted to use a lot of electronic sounds and less or no guitars really, and no real drums. So that all kind of goes with the modern pop music [feel], but I think our sensibilities kind of take it to a different place than your average pop record. I think it’s kind of in a vortex between pop and our other bands.

Batmanglij: …Another connection to that, I think, is that on “Orange Shirt,” which is one of the earliest songs that we started making together, and one of the ones we were really just trying to go for it and make R&B, I think the melody is a big part of what makes it sounds like R&B—because there are melodies that you’d only hear in the R&B of the ‘90s and 2000s.

Paste: The lyrics are kind of light-hearted and fun, with references to text-messaging and sleeping at a girl’s house when she still lives with her mom. So, did you guys have a lot of fun writing this?

Batmanglij: A lot of the lyrics are kind of dark, I think, though! [Laughing] You don’t think the lyrics are dark? OK. [Laughing] It’s because there’s no minor key songs. That’s part of it, why maybe even if the lyrics are dark, it doesn’t really come across that way.
 
Paste: Well, songs like “Carby,” which I think is definitely coming from a female perspective, you at least got to let your imaginations go a little a bit. I mean, that song’s really about a girl who’s all alone at the club, right?

Batmanglij: I’m glad that you were able to tell that that song was from a female perspective. Most people can’t. So, props to you, Julia. The story behind that song is that, it was a class that Ezra and I took in college where we read a chapter from a book by a Yale professor named Hazel V. Carby and I think there’s a quote from a South Asian girl who basically says, “Where’s the freedom in going to disco if you end up alone?” And so that was this song that Ezra wrote for someone else to sing a long time ago, and it kind of entered this purgatory. And when we were finishing this album, we needed one more song. So, I was like, “Ezra, let’s do this song. Let’s make this like crunk-techno version of this song.” [Laughs] And he was into it.

Paste: Speaking of the club, you talk a lot about going to “discotheques” and stuff like that. Do you guys go out dancing ever in your free time?

Miles: [Laughing] Not really.

Batmanglij: See, let me tell you the story behind that. I wrote that lyric, “I saw you at the discotheque” kind of as a tribute to my mom, because she’s the only person I know who uses the word discotheque. She grew up in Iran in the 1960s and 70s, you know—that’s what they called it.

Paste: So you guys don’t go out dancing at clubs in New York? Because I’m curious where you would dance to these songs you’re making.

Batmanglij: Well, there’s this party at Santos where there’s kind of this Latin music... This girl Maluca performs there. So that’s the last time I went dancing.

Paste: So if you don’t really go dancing that often—

Batmanglij: No, we do, we do. Come on, Wes, we do sometimes. [Laughing]

Miles: Maybe a little bit.  When we’re in London, there are dance after-parties. I guess there are after-parties at our shows in New York, too. But that is kind of the fun we had [on LP]. Like, we don’t really get to sing about going out dancing in our other bands, or at least, we don’t that much.

Paste: Rostam, we get to hear you sing a lot on this album—there’s a lot of harmonizing—which you don’t do as much with your other band. Should we expect to hear more of your vocals on the Vampire Weekend follow-up or other projects of yours?

Batmanglij: Yeah I’m always working on projects. But yeah, I like that for the most part [with] Vampire Weekend, Ezra is the lead singer. I think that’s one of the cool things about it, but it’s an evolving thing, and who knows what the future will bring. But on this album, Wes and I each sing about half of the songs, so it’s a bit different.

Paste: Speaking of your other bands though, what do they think of Discovery? Are they impressed?

Miles: Yeah, they’ve all been pretty supportive and really into it since the beginning.

Batmanglij: And yeah we had been making music since before we were in the bands we’re in now. So I think they were always rooting for us to finally finish something. [Laughing] It’d be pretty ridiculous if we had all these songs and then just sat on them.

Paste: There are a lot of references to Japan on this album. Have either of you ever been?

Miles: Yeah, we both have been there.

Paste: Did you study there?

Miles: Yeah, I studied in Japan for a semester in college. I was in Osaka.  I think I remember just Rostam asking me one day, like, “Wait, is there really a subway in Japan that is just like a loop? In Osaka… that’s like just a big circle?” And I was like, “Yeah, I used to ride that train.” And I think that’s like the first time I [thought of] “Osaka Loop Line” as a Discovery song. But a lot of the lyrics in “Orange Shirt” are just kind of about the vibe of living there. I took a lot of lyrics from the feelings I had when I was living there.

Paste: Do you see this as a summer album? It had been laying dormant for a while, and then it sort of came out short notice that it would be released the first week of July. Was that intentional?

Miles: Well, maybe [it’s] just through osmosis that all the songs just feel summery. I don’t know if that’s just projecting the release date onto the album. But we did do a lot of the work in summers because that’s when I would be back in or around New York and Rostam would be there. And we started making music in the summer of 2005 when I just got back from Japan—and then the next summer, and the next summer, and the next summer—so I think that had a lot of effect on the feels of the songs. But we didn’t like deliberately choose the summer to release it.

Paste: I know you said you’re probably not going to tour with this album, but is this a one-shot deal? Or do you think you’ll continue making music as Discovery?

Batmanglij: Can’t stop, won’t stop, right?

Miles: [Laughs] Can’t stop, won’t stop.

Batmanglij: I think we’ll keep on making music. Yeah, I think there will be another Discovery album, but hopefully it’ll sound very different. Not hopefully—it will definitely sound very different. It will have a different set of governing principles. And that’s part of the fun of it, just like, limitations—like “only do these things” and then “OK, ten songs, go for it.” That was kind of how we made this album. And hopefully we can make another one.

Listen to "Orange Shirt" from Discovery's LP: