Recently part of the Chief Magazine staff ventured to Boston for a little vacation and got to see BATTLES. The crowd was full of college douche bags, so we spilled some drinks on people, but the set was great, and afterwards we talked to their drummer, John Stainer, about New York, the term ‘Math Rock’, and making sexy music.

Chief: How long have you guys been together?

John Stainer: We have been together for four and a half years.

You guys have all been in other bands like Helmet and several other bands, so how did you all come together?

The band started in Brooklyn four and a half years ago. Ian’s the one guy who know knows everyone, he knows Dave and Ty [Tyondai]. Ian and Dave started talking, Ian just moved from Chicago, Ty was in New York and wanted to do something together, Dave I think was also from Chicago, so the three of them started to do stuff together. I ran into Ian on the street in Brooklyn, and I had known Ian from years and years ago, from Helmet, and I was looking for something to do as well, so you know he just invited me to come down and  check out what they were doing. It took a really long time for it to get off the ground.

Why is that?

Just because we wanted to do something totally and completely different where we had already been from our previous bands. It wasn’t like instant magic, it took a while to really gel. I’m sure most bands will tell you in their early days, you know, the first rehearsal was instant magic but it certainly was not the case for this band.

When you guys write and create music for Battles, is it a collaborative effort?

Yeah, totally.

What kind of inspired you to do something different?

I don’t know, Its kinda like people expect this complex and grandiose answer to that, it’s kind of like, and I know that this is a completely vague answer, but it’s just four completely different people in different age groups and different backgrounds, getting together, and the only thing that we have in common is that we really didn’t want to repeat ourselves. It was already pretty weird to begin with right off the bat, its definitely a collaborate effort, where one person will bring in an idea, and you know, we just go from there.

I was at home watching Nip/Tuck recently, and your song [Atlas] was used on the show, are you excited about that, or are you just glad that your music is getting out to other people…

I just feel that I like seriously don’t care at all really, I mean I’ve never seen the show, I don’t know anything about it, I will probably never see the show, or watch TV, it’s such a separate world, so like I don’t’ know, its kind of a hard call, but I think we were just like ‘okay, yeah whatever,’ but I certainly wouldn’t want our music to be you know in a million different commercials, and these stupid reality TV shows…

You wouldn’t want to go the way of Moby.

Oh, no way, no way…I mean it would have to be a totally right thing, I mean every artist is going to tell you something different, but I think the bottom line is if you do commercials, it’s for money, of course it is, you’d be lying if it wasn’t. I mean we work hard at what we do, and we’re trying to make a living at it, so its like if Exxon wants to give us a shitload of money to use a little bit of our song in a car commercial or gas commercial, then hell yeah. Gotta pay rent.