Ra Ra Riot: TAS In Session

Ra Ra Riot has taken some dramatic turns over its seven years in existence. The band's latest shapeshifting feat on its new album, Beta Love, brings an electronic sweep to Ra Ra Riot's sound, reflecting not only a change in lineup and approach, but a new producer.

The group — Wes Miles, Matt Santos, Milo Bonacci, Rebecca Zeller, Emily Brausa and Kenny Bernard — will be touring with Postal Service this spring, playing Brooklyn's Barclays Center on June 15.  

The Syracuse-born band recently visited Studio A for a session and a conversation. Below, watch the live performance videos and listen to Ra Ra Riot this Friday, April 19, at 11 a.m. EDT on TAS on 91.5 WNYE, also streaming online. 

UPDATE: Listen to Ra Ra Riot's TAS session now in the FUV archives.

Alisa Ali: For your last album, The Orchard, you went to a peach orchard.

Matt Santos: Yeah, we wrote the majority of it in a peach orchard in upstate New York. Finger Lakes region. Really beautiful farm that was run by Red Jacket Orchards.

Alisa: So did you guys have millions of peaches for free?

Matt: We had hundreds of peaches for free. They were mostly, to my chagrin, white peaches. The yellow peaches were ripening as we were getting towards the middle of our stay there. We had a long weekend of shows and then they were all taken. They were all ripe and taken in the time we were gone.

Wes Miles: Just that one weekend We came back and they were gone.

Matt: We didn’t see that coming. Wes, Milo and I woke up early the day we got back and we literally had baskets and tote bags. We thought we’d go out and they’d be perfect. And all the trees were bare. That’s when the album took a dark turn.

Alisa: What about Beta Love? I heard you went to Missouri.

Matt: Mississippi actually. I have found online that some places say Missouri.

Wes: Really?

Matt: No, Oxford, Mississippi. Mostly to work with the producer [Dennis Herring]. He has what is renowned as one of the top five studios, [Sweet Tea]. in the country. One of the best, nicest, vibiest places to record. Also, his skills are to be reckoned with.

Alisa: He’s worked with Elvis Costello and Modest Mouse. What did he bring to the table?

Matt: It’s kind of hard to parse out from the rest of us. Some of the biggest things were just pushing us to do our best, to try new things.

Wes: Just with a lot of our individual performances on the record, a lot of the sounds and I think he really helped us a lot. The songs are a bit more trimmed down, I guess.

Alisa: Did they start off long?

Matt: In the demo phase, usually there’s snippet type demos — 30 seconds — and you have to fill them out. There’s also jam-type demos that are really long. We had a fair share of both, but usually we’d let those longer ones be long. We do like to jam! I think that we were, for the purposes of making this record, making a condensed, concise, purposeful sounding record.

Wes: Just like our answers to interview questions!

Alisa: This record does sound very different from your previous releases and I remember, for The Orchard, Peter Silberman of The Antlers did a crazy remix in which he took snippets from the entire album and turned it into one song. But your new record does take a more electronic approach. Was that a little bit of an influence?  

Wes: As far as The Antlers remix goes, we let artists have carte blanche. That one turned out great. Making the record, we spent a lot of time thinking about a lot of changes we could make. We had been given an opportunity to change. Our original cellist left and we also felt at the end of making The Orchard, [our process] had become restrictive and limiting. [We realized] that insisting on every instrument playing on every section of every song was actually burdensome for all of us. We got an opportunity to pare back those arrangements and that was something we were really excited about.

Matt: A lot of the electronic stuff had been floating around for a while. In our first incarnation we had a lot of electronic riffing going on, but over the years, we became a little more self-conscious about having these synth-heavy songs. But, like, “Too Too Too Fast” on The Rhumb Line or “Foolish” or “Too Dramatic” on The Orchard, you can tell the songs are built on keyboard riffs. This time around, we wanted to to be more open and go with what felt right.

Alisa: So were most of these songs composed on keyboards?

Wes: Yeah, I think so. Most of the songs I write for the band start on keyboard and a lot of times [a certain part] will sound better as a string arrangement or a guitar riff. For me, writing on keyboard is really familiar, but as Matt said, we decided to not move away from that, to not be afraid of keyboads and electronic sounds.

[video:http://youtu.be/knM69MNk0PU]

Alisa: The lyrics for the record are very futuristic. You were inspired by William Gibson and Ray Kurzweil. Were you all reading the same book at the same time, The Singularity is Near?

Wes: No, that kind of started a while a go. Matt read that.

Matt: I was reading that book, Ray Kurzweil's book, when we were living on the peach orchard we were talking about. I forget why I’d gotten into it. Perhaps because all of the peaches were gone and I needed some sort of salvation so I turned to this idea about technology and singularity.

Alisa: I don’t see the link between technology and peaches. Please elaborate.

Matt: I knew that once the singularity happened, I’d be able to download infinited peaches.

Wes: Infinite peaches.

Matt: I was reading that book and Wes studied science in school, so I bounced ideas off of him. We started talking about that book a lot and everyone else in the band got interested or at least were humoring us, talking about it all of the time. Part of that attitude, embracing what we were into at a given moment with this new record, I think when it came time to work on these songs, I remember Wes emailing me, “I think I’m going to write a song about Ray Kurzweil.” In the past we would have said that was awesome, but we can’t do it. But we’d been talking about these ideas, they were interesting to us, so [we thought] let’s examine them further.

Wes: The book hit us at the right moment and Matt and I are really into weird science things. From there, that was a catalyst to William Gibson and that was a big influence on the lyrics. It’s all part of the story, but we’re all reading different things.

Matt: We spend so much time together.

Wes: Everyone reads the same thing so we always talk about it.

Matt: Eventually. We’ll go, “What are you reading?” Have a little chat. We’re always sharing ideas.

Alisa: So a little bit of a book club?

Matt: Yeah, a litlte bit. Wes: We all sleep three feet away from each other.

Alisa: On tour ... or always?

Wes: Just on tour. (laughs). And recording. It’s hard to read something without other people knowing. On our early tours when we’d sleep in the van and no one could fall asleep, I would tell people stories, very boring stories, until everyone was sound asleep.

[video:http://youtu.be/PiyFDKfM_dM]