(This feature originally appeared in the SF Weekly.)

For the past hour or so, drummer John Stanier has been feeding me with info on his new group, Battles. But at this stage in the phone call my recorder is already stuffed with more than enough raw quotage for my story. So I ask him one of those end-of-the-interview, not terribly relevant, possibly problematic types of questions, a question that happened to pop into my life about three years back when I was still living in New York.

One night in Brooklyn (or was it morning?) my friend Mr. X and I consumed about a case of beer and several teeny-tiny Ziploc baggies of pitifully low-grade cocaine (i.e. baking soda that makes you feel “like kinda fucked-up, man”). We were yackety-yaking about all kinds of extremely inconsequential matters including this needlessly volatile debate: Who is more influential on modern mainstream metal, Helmet or Metallica? Now, being way, way more into such lighter fare during my high school years as Toad the Wet Sprocket and Spin Doctors, I really knew next to nothing about either heavy hitter so I logically argued in favor of the band who earned more platinum records and that band is Metallica. Mr. X, a devout Helmet fan and harsh critic of Metallica, disagreed, and he especially did not want to hear my “It’s whoever sold more records” argument.

“Listen, douche bag,” Mr. X snarled. “All you gotta to do is turn on the goddamn radio and listen to one of these 24-hour rap-n-rage-n-metal stations. Every shit band you’ll hear steals their rhythms from Helmet. Their influence is so beyond huge that I can’t believe we are even arguing about this.”

I’m now selfishly dragging Stanier into this ancient Metallica vs. Helmet debate because this dude was the drummer for Helmet, which means he is, in large part, responsible for busting out those hugely influential rhythms.

“I am blown away by that [Mr. X's] statement,” Stanier cordially answers while also revealing a slight chill. “I am so flattered. I am so very, very proud of what [Helmet] did, but I’m really not into talking about Helmet all that much.”

Stanier’s nonresponse to my question is not at all surprising. Indeed, I expect it and not solely because musicians generally abhor interviews wherein writers exhume long-dead projects for critical examination. My expectation is more the product of this theory about Battles, a notion I developed during the course of my background research for this interview. In a nutshell, it goes something like this: Battles appear to be manipulating their image by employing certain techniques that allow them to get their music quietly released and distributed while avoiding the very debilitating side effects of the commercial mass media — overexposure, instant “genre-fication,” and hypercategorization until the members and their music would feel like nothing more than the sum total of a brief bio, discography, style map, and a dozen hyperlinks to like-sounding groups, all found in the All Music Guide. What Battles are trying to operate like is a kind of “phantom,” which Merriam-Webster defines as “something (as a specter) apparent to sense but with no substantial existence.” Sure, that sounds a bit “out there,” but go ahead and chew on that definition for a few minutes. It captures the essence of what every musician (and artist) with an ounce of integrity craves — to be heard (“sensed”) but not commercially pegged (“no substantial existence”). And Battles most definitely possess sundry reasons for wanting not to be pegged than just Stanier’s notable past.

***

If you fancy yourself a fairly astute follower of indie rock, but have not yet heard (or heard of) the metronomic, methodically structured, almost austere post-rock pulse of Battles, then you are not alone. Most music nerds I queried had no idea who the hell Battles were either, despite the fact they are from big-time New York, have been touring almost nonstop since last fall, and “in the extreme indie world [are] considered a supergroup,” Stanier soberly admits.

Each member of this quartet is an accomplished and fairly renowned indie musician in his own right. In addition to Stanier, Battles is David Konopka on bass; he also plucked those four strings for Lynx, a Chicago-based, instrumental math-rock outfit from the late ’90s. Ian Williams jams guitar and synth. He was the virtuoso axeman for the now legendary math-rock troupe Don Caballero, which pretty much invented the genre if I’m not mistaken. And also playing guitar and synth, as well as tape loops and human beat box, is Tyondai Braxton, who lives a second life as an avant-garde indie-loner constructing “orchestrated loops” from voice, guitar, found objects, and pedals, and regularly collaborates with a diverse collection of modern composers and free jazzbos. He is also the son of Anthony Braxton, a visionary reedman, prolific composer, professor, and monolithic presence in the development of 20th-century free jazz and modern composition.

Now I recently read on one of these Yahoo Group discussion boards for total indie groupies (like myself) that Braxton does not particularly enjoy answering questions from strangers about his distinguished pops, which I would wager happens on a fairly regular basis considering just how garrulous a fan with a few pints in the belly can get. I ask Stanier to confirm this nugget of cybergossip. “I can sort of see that,” he says, adding “but that is some personal stuff.” Fair enough.

As for Williams, I attended several Don Cab shows “back in the day,” and there was always some joker in the rear of the audience heckling them between jams — hurling such chestnuts as “Play some Rush” or “Where’s Mr. Chops?” The perceived progenitors of math rock received their fair share of critical abuse in the late ’90s (some justified, some not), such that now their aesthetic is a wholly untouchable genre of indie rock that’s too old to still be hip but not old enough to get “retro-ized.”

“The last thing I would ever want to be lumped in with is prog or late ’90s math rock,” Stanier admits. “I can’t stand that shit. I hate it when people lump Battles in with math rock. That’s the worst. I don’t want to have anything to do with that scene.”

Thus, in Battles we appear to have four dudes all carrying around these anchor-heavy pasts and feeling the need to ditch them; they just want to make a new sound and be left alone about legendary fathers and those days when the ADD-addled indie press labeled whatever it was each musician was doing as the “hip shit.”

Battles’ strategy to achieve this goal is a multilayered one and really quite clever. They started by erasing the most obvious signs. The group has released three discs to date and not a single one comes packaged with the ubiquitous “Featuring members of…” promotional sticker — an all too rare omission in the age of hyperconsumerism.

“We haven’t really pushed the band as ‘featuring former members of…’ and that’s been pretty cool,” Stanier admits. “I really like it that nobody really knows that I’m in this band.”

In fact, those encryption code-looking titles and the shared design of these three near-identical-looking releases kind of beg for record shoppers to pass them by when browsing the bins; it’s as if they do not want to be detected. Each cover is a decidedly mundane photograph of some all-too-average side-of-the-highway landscape: snarled thatches of yellow, overgrown weeds, decayed pavement, and, oddly enough, countless yards of tangled cassette tape strewn all about. The actual name Battles and the title are only visible across the narrow spine of the Digipak. However, according to Stanier, all that messy cassette tape found on each cover does spell out B-A-T-T-L-E-S in some terribly abstract lettering.

“All the discs connect into kind of a story. It’s all very strategic,” Stanier reveals, but like some acid-damaged dipshit holding the Magical Mystery Tour LP up to the bathroom mirror and looking for clues, I have yet to decipher any hidden message or concealed narratives, and the band’s Web site — mirroring the barren design of its discs to a T — is of absolutely no help. It supplies only a scant amount of biographical data in the form of a hand-scrawled layout of their assiduously organized stage setup and several blurry live pics. “We have a ton of shit onstage,” Stanier proudly boasts. “We have eight amps.”

Battles initially recorded 12 jams (enough for a debut full-length) that they decided to sprinkle over a CD single and two CD EPs, each released on a radically different label. (Remember, these dudes’ previous groups were basically album-oriented rockers, and their fan base traditionally prefers purchasing full-lengths.) Cold Sweat Records released the Tras CD single; its stark, skeletal, post-Fugazi indie-funk grooves and man-machine, minimalist precision are aesthetically far removed from the SoCal punk the label typically pushes (as well as anything else these musicians themselves have ever really done). The same can be said of Battles’ relationship to the Dim Mak Records catalog, which released the stridently mechanistic, synth-laden B EP (the group’s most experimental and, I think, rewarding release), but the label basically peddles garage rock, retro post-punk, and indie pop. Monitor Records, which released EP C, is the only label of the three that I can envision releasing a Battles’ disc because the music just might kind of, sort of lock into some post-rock, Albini-ized drum-sound aesthetic that the Baltimore-based label is attempting to document, but that’s a conspicuous stretch to say the least. Stanier’s diminutive kit, as recorded on this disc, does possess a certain hollow rock boom as if Steve Albini were twiddling the knobs, but the drummer’s sound also exhibits this rather sharp, pulsating pop (derived from his total love for hip hop and dance grooves) that I have never heard on, say, Shellac or Burning Witch records.

This rock-dance ambiguity in Stanier’s drum sound reflects a much larger development in Battles’ overall aesthetic: the dissolution of the traditional differences between man-powered indie rock and machine-generated IDM. When initially checking out this music, a big, fat “Dunno” was my initial answer to the question “Who or what makes which sound and how?” Guitars and synths chirp like computers in start-up mode. Stanier’s airtight beats lock onto Braxton’s tape loops with radar-guided precision, and Konopka’s low end feels slightly more laptop than electric bass. In fact, the 12-minute “Fantasy” (off Tras) and the ambient throb of “Bttls” (off B EP) distinctly feel like four humans reinterpreting (in the form of live performance-based music) the microscopically constructed, deep-focus rhythms of minimal techno as popularized by the German imprint Kompakt. The results are something kinda human, kinda artificial, kinda both, but also kinda none of the above, hence me scratching my head in confusion.

So what we’ve got here is a group of indie vets with no exclusive label, no consistently utilized medium, no articulated genre, and no scene, making music that, track upon track, strives to conceal its own processes. Thus, they and their music appear to possess “no substantial existence.” I unload all this on Stanier. I also tell him I think “the band is trying to ditch the past,” adding, “It seems like Battles wants to be some kind of phantom presence.”

“That’s it exactly,” Stanier confesses. “We like the idea that people are confused. That sounds weird but I believe it. It just lets us concentrate on what we want to do.”