Battles’ newest single The Yabba from their upcoming album La Di Da invites you on an architectural tour, every moment a meditation on form and texture or the collision of the two.
It starts with a brutalist facade, slabs of concrete that appear flat before you find them to be softly ribbed, just framed in sharp edges. You enter and the structure gives way to repetition, which you discover to be the building blocks of the foundation. Enter a winding, circular stairwell where you step step after step, each one ascending, always forward though never in a straight line. Upwards and you're looped into a parlor, drenched in rich swathes of color: ochre, veridian, carmine (Isn’t it just yellow, green and red? Yes, but in names you almost know and in a diagonal palette). You're ushered into a bar where He's juicing oranges (a kiwi, maybe?), but don't mind Him. The lights flicker, you move along.
Up over a bridge—a moment of calm, the edge between states—before descending onto a platform that revolves you through tiers of countless spinning angular platforms: each rotating at its own speed, each one deciding its own direction, in a momentum that only matters relative to the others. Maybe it’s the incessant flickering of the light or maybe it’s the perpetual motion that reveals each disc's texture—the sheen of a spinning glass mirror, an array of wobbling paper discs, a rotating concrete platform that denies reverberation—each reflecting the other and each playing its part in this incongruous harmony. How did you find yourself here?
Endure this for a moment, take off your shoes, be reminded that the earth spins at an incredible velocity beneath you, run in the other direction, stay.
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