Battles bassist and guitarist Dave Konopka holds down what he calls a "full-time side job" — as the experimental rockers' art director. As such, the Massachusetts College of Art and Design alum has masterminded the evocative covers for each Battles release, plus their posters, merch, and more. Konopka credits bandmates Ian Williams and John Stanier with supporting his "bizarre ideas," whether that means a toxically torrid plexiglass cube or still-life edibles that bring new meaning to food porn.
Today, Warp reissues Battles' out-of-print albums, 2006's Mirrored and 2011's Gloss Drop, as well as issuing their 2006 EP C/B EP in full for the first time on vinyl. Konopka spoke to Pitchfork via Skype from his Brooklyn home about the story behind each of Battles’ striking album covers. "It’s almost like when you exercise and you feel better mentally," he says. "It’s a similar correlation between music and art for me."
EP C/BEP (2006), which combines 2004's EP C and BEP
“The way that we became a band was very organic,” Konopka says. “We were doing this slow dance for a while of just jamming out songs. Our friend Emery [Dobyns] recorded our first two EPs. We were sneaking into this studio Dubway overnight, and we would record from midnight when the studio was supposed to be closed until 7 in the morning. I asked the band, ‘So, cover-wise, does anyone have anything they're trying to get across?’ And Ian said, ‘I really like the way a cassette tape looks when it's strewn across the highway, or someone throws a cassette out the window, and the tape takes on this new form.’ [Ed. note: It’s subtle, but look closely at the original B cover and C cover, and you’ll see tape strewn through the wilderness.]
“Jason Fulford was the photographer. I just loved his work — still do. I contacted him and was like, ‘This could be a shot in the dark, but would you be into shooting a couple shots for us for some EPs?’ He said, ‘Come to Scranton, Pennsylvania. My studio's there and we'll do it.’ So Ian and I drove to Scranton and found a couple locations and ran with that concept of cassette tape and conveying this weird organic nature of who we were as a band at the time. We were so conscious of not making this huge explosion and declaration that we were this band. We just wanted to do this soft release.
“The EP C/B EP artwork is all sourced from the original [B and C covers]. We released one on Dim Mak and one on Monitor, but once Warp took over licensing the EPs for the full EP C/B EP release, we wanted to have artwork that tied everything together. I couldn't just choose one of those images because they were both equal in importance, so I need to find something that was from the same batch but encompassed both.”
Mirrored (2007)
“It was definitely inspired by the [Robert Fripp and Brian Eno] (No Pussyfooting) album cover. But I really liked the concept of using the tools that we use to make our songs and trying to visually represent the elements of what we do as a band. The foundation of almost every Battles song is repetition. I wanted to try to visually represent that repetition, so my brothers and I built that cube.
“I contacted Tim Saccenti and was like, ‘Would you be into shooting the album cover? I want to build this room of double-side plexi mirrors, and have all of our stage setup inside of it and have this infinite reflection thing going on.’ He said, ‘We might as well shoot a video while we're doing it, too, right?’
“I didn't want to see any beams in it or any of the structure, I just wanted as much glass cube as we could. We used an aluminum grid and rented a sound stage for three days and bought all these plexi mirrors that we had shipped up from the South. I came off tour and had a week to put that together and I was freaking out, like, ‘This is never gonna work.’
“Tim knew we had to shoot the video first because the lights were so hot, it was melting the plexiglass, and with still photos, if anything looks crappy in real life, you can control that in Photoshop. It was the most toxic-fumed, hot environment. We didn't even make a door for it. We had to pop out in between two pieces of plexi and just stand in front of fans for a little bit.”
Gloss Drop (2011)
“I didn’t want to have a huge production that involved so many people. My brother had a wood shop in Brooklyn, and I asked if I could just borrow a corner of it. And actually out of the plexiglass that was used for the Mirrored cube, I built this space and started filling it with Great Stuff, the spray foam that a lot of carpenters use to fill huge gaps. It just expands but essentially that shit is like Super Glue. That was way more toxic and this time, it was just me taking all the heat for that. So I kept going to my brother’s shop every day and just spraying, maybe five cases of that stuff, spraying Great Stuff on top of Great Stuff until it was this giant mound that had this form that I really liked.
“It was really just opposites. Everything about the Mirrored album cover was this sharp-edged, concave environment, and I wanted to go convex with no sharp corners. This blob of nothingness is really what I wanted. It turns out the non-representational imagery that happened during that album really coincided with the way the entire album came together, because we were really feeling around the dark. It took us a long time in the studio. I had the concept of how I wanted the artwork to come across before we were finished recording so I had a lot of time to test some things out.
“In person that thing doesn’t look as beautiful as it does on the cover. I owe so much of the aesthetic of that album to my friend Lesley Unruh, who is one of the best photographers I know.”
Dross Glop (remix album, 2012)
“That was still using the original [concoction from the Gloss Drop cover art]. I broke up the entire blob, hacked it up with a machete and rebuilt smaller piles and started incorporating different colors.”
La Di Da Di(2015)
“The way that La Di Da Di came together, we were communicating a lot more, but the communication was very ambiguous. I was having a really hard time encompassing what the general concept could be behind the album or the essence of what we were going through creatively. At the end of it, I found that my being stuck in that process of trying to articulate what our creative process was like, I realized that was the epitome of what our creative process was: the difficulty to translate ideas to one another but still having this intuition of how to make music together.”
“The gist of it was partially that I wanted it to be fairly humorous. We'd never really touched upon humor before, or anything sexual at all. I don’t think we’ll ever have anything overtly sexual on our album covers, but the closest it will come to that will be a watermelon and banana. The essence of what I was trying to get across was almost like if you had a potluck but no communication as to what anyone was bringing to this potluck or what time of day it was. It was this combination of all these bizarre foods and how you forced these relationships between them.”
“As the food photos evolve within the album imagery, you realize that there are these really disgusting forced juxtapositions, and it kind of creates this nausea in my opinion. It’s still really beautiful, but it’s this disgusting-looking imagery that creates this almost inner burp. But if I used paint or something to convey this type of concept it would just look like. ‘Oh, Dave’s getting artsy on this one.’”