Ratatat

By Meredith Turits; photos courtesy of Beggars Group USA

“I think people are pretty obsessed with the Internet in general, and it’s a quick and easy way to find out about new music, as well as anything else in the world, so blogging and MySpace, YouTube, etcetera, have obviously helped propel us into the public eye,” guitarist Mike Stroud finishes.

Now operating on a full-scale level, Ratatat finds it hard to ever have pinned themselves as a local act. Their vision has taken them straight from part-time spontaneous composers to a 24/7 duo with a name, and they’ve had learn and change on the fly as a result. While having made the transition, Evan Mast, keyboardist and producer, still thinks that for a band with a different sound, organic growth is possible.

Though everyone knows there’s no formula to success, bands constantly find themselves worrying about taking the next step and making the transition to recognition. As if that weren’t hard enough, add into the mix a sonic profile that’s not traditionally sought after commercially. With the difficulty of breaking out combined with a potentially difficult sound to market, the process of crossing into the spotlight can seem almost impossible.

When thinking about Brooklyn-based electro duo -- a nationally-established name, several headlining tours, and three successful records later -- it’s easy to forget that they were ever in the same place. But in taking a step back, it’s strange to think about how a band whose sound that can be called nearly everything but commercial was propelled into the national forum. Their newest record, July 2008’s LP3 on XL Recordings made a splash on the Billboard Top 200 at number 82 and topped the iTunes Electronic chart. Admittedly, it’s a surprising amount of ground that a niche band isn’t necessarily expected to traverse, but, according to Mast, the transition has been surprisingly organic.

“It all happened at once,” Mast says, recalling elements of the band’s beginnings.

In 2001, Ratatat’s Mast and Stroud began playing together for the first time. With Stroud tied up from touring as a hired guitarist, the project was meant to be something to keep the friends busy when Stroud was back in New York, where Mast was doing work a as freelance graphic designer. With a couple of tracks recorded and completed in Mast’s Brooklyn apartment, the pair threw the demos up onto the Web. The tracks started garnering interest from labels, including their eventual home XL, even before they had “started anything totally serious.”

“Even up to that point in our recording career, we weren’t necessarily trying to be a band,” Stroud says. “We just liked making songs together and we wrote everything as we recorded it. So, when our XL A&R guy, Matt Thornhill, approached me in London, I was pretty shocked.”

“We decided to turn it into a bigger project so we ended up recording our first record, which included the four songs from the website,” Mast says. Burrowing in their Brooklyn studio, the band packed the first record into a finished product, as well as figured out how to make their music happen live. “We were bouncing back and forth between recording and touring,” he says.

The pair embarked with no intention to make Ratatat a full-time job, but the reality was staring them in the face; all of a sudden, fiddling the knobs in Mast’s apartment began generating enough money to take care of rent. Mast laughs thinking about it, noting that he stopped shuttling between design and music as soon as Ratatat could pay the bills.

As Ratatat’s notoriety has reached stunning heights, the band and their process has undergone changes that directly reflect learning to operate at a new level. Recording LP3 took the band into a proper studio, something they’d never done before.

“That was a pretty big change of pace because we were always recording in an apartment and there were tons of interruptions,” Mast says. “We’d record for a couple of hours and go home and deal with the rest of our lives.” Heading upstate to Catskill, NY’s Old Soul Studios, the band isolated themselves to focus on the music, which also opened up access to a whole slew of new equipment. The trip was made possible by their successes from their previous release, 2006’s Classics. “In the past, we didn’t have any recording budget at all,” Mast continues. “This time we didn’t have a recording budget either, but we had made some money on touring before we went into the studio and put that towards recording.”

While Ratatat has experienced growth with each release, including the “mix tapes” that the band posts online, LP3 has been the key transitional record that’s rocketed Ratatat into previously non- traversed grounds of national notice.

“It made people at XL and us feel proud because we’ve put a lot of work in,” Stroud says. “I was happy about being the top electronic record on iTunes when our record came out. It seemed like there was a heightened awareness of our band.”

Touring has evolved, too. Now coming off of their latest headlining tour, it’s no longer a battle to “win over the audience,” as Mast says. “Now [people] know our music and they know what to expect in a way so it’s a totally different kind of feeling. I was excited that two weeks after the record came out, we’d play the first note [of a song] and people would respond in the audience.”

But while recording touring, the band has seen serious swells and transformations, and some things Ratatat has learned operate outside of the sphere of their reach. The biggest? The Internet. A very active outlet for Ratatat, who constantly post their remixes and signature videos, a lot of the band’s national-life has come alive through fan-based web promotion.

“There’s a lot more Internet stuff happening now - a billion blogs that people can go on and read another person’s review,” Mast says of the publicity swell that LP3 has jump started. “I think it’s kind of cool that there are so many ways that people can get their opinions out there, but it’s also kind of deceiving, too, because you can’t really get a good cross-section of what people think of something. It takes a certain kind of person to want to [post their opinion] and a lot of time people want to put out a differing opinion for their music review to be a bit of a shock or something.”

“I don’t really read blogs too much, but I’m sure they’ve helped us in a lot of ways,” Stroud says, continuing the thought. “Even though both of our last records leaked out about a month or two in advance, it seemed like all the blogging and sharing of the music online helped create a buzz for the record’s release.”

No strangers to big-name outlets such as Brooklyn Vegan and Pitchfork Media, LP3 also was a seriously hot commodity on indie community blogs and torrent sites both prior to and following its street date.

“It’s hard to measure what impact that stuff really has,” Mast says. “We don’t get radio play and we don’t get MTV play or anything like that, so those kind of word of mouth methods seem to be where most of our promotion comes from. I think people like to feel like they’re discovering something.”

“We’d probably be a lot richer if we were trying to sound like The Killers or something, or if we were doing synthpop or something,” Mast says. While Ratatat’s feats are certainly tangible, Mast seems humble about success. “We might be doing a lot better, but it would be a lot more forgettable.”

Perhaps taking music from hobby to career isn’t such a far-fetched idea for bands that don’t follow the mainstream formula.

As Mast says, “Don’t try and be successful.
That’s my best advice.”

www.myspace.com/ratatatmusic