Ratatat on the road

The Brooklyn-based rocktronica duo of Mike Stroud and producer Evan Mast talks about their journey and plans for their upcoming gig at Magnetic Fields

No, Ratatat wasn’t a household name. In fact, they were called Cherry and people still wondered how to react to their sound. But that was before they grew to be a burgeoning rocktronica act, belting one hit after another across music festivals like Coachella, Primavera Sound and The Governor’s Ball in New York. Set against the opulence of Alsisar Mahal in Rajasthan, Magnetic Fields Festival now joins that list as the duo sets to crank it up a notch from December 18-20. One half of Ratatat, Evan Mast talks to us before their long-due, debut trip to India.

They haven’t been to India before and didn’t start touring until their fifth and latest album, Magnifique. “It’s a bit strange that this year, we have played at a lot of festivals with a lot of EDM acts on the line-up and our music is an anomaly in that sense. People at these festivals want house beats with a drop – they know how to react to that. When we come on stage, our music is nothing like that, so there are a lot of confused people in the audience,” says Evan Mast, getting candid. The Brooklyn-based duo, who is known for making electronic instrumental music structured with melodic precision and flecked with agile and abrasive interplay of guitar, finds it “difficult to explain” their sound — naturally. They are also not too fond of lyrics and have kept it out of their music. “Both Mike and I have been greatly influenced by 60s rock, guitar-based music. We borrow a lot of production ideas from there and are really drawn to those times.

On the other hand, we are influenced by pop and a lot of other different things we listen to,” says Ivan, believing that DJing in particular, has become a new way to interact with the music.

Ivan says that his meeting with Mike before they became Cherry (now Ratatat) was casual as can be (read: a chance meeting on a New York subway). “I just invited him to come over to record music. The first thing we made was a fun song, super dance-y and it was done pretty quickly as well. We kept doing it, and before we knew it, we had four songs and offers from record labels to do an album. It just fell into our lap. Fate had conspired for us to meet,” he says. How then did they ditch their old name “Oh, our lawyer didn’t want us to use that name since a couple of bands were already using it — thank God,” quips Ivan. Now, several music albums and festivals old, Ratatat will be on the road for a while. Until then, it’s basking in “the beautiful regions and cultures” that is India.