Long before Ra Ra Riot performed a single note of its dancetronic third album, Beta Love (Barsuk), the band talked at great length about the need for a change. The viscerally charged chamber-pop outfit had maintained a steady course after the tragic 2007 drowning death of beloved drummer John Pike, blossomed on its 2008 Barsuk full-length debut, The Rhumb Line, and flourished with a variety of subsequent beatkeepers, but everyone felt the inevitable tug of creative evolution after 2010 sophomore album The Orchard. The roles of violinist Rebecca Zeller and guitarist Milo Bonacci changed the most dramatically; with the dominance of the synthesizer on Beta Love, Bonacci was forced to radically reimagine/rewrite his guitar contributions and take on more expansive sonic duties, while Zeller was freed up to explore new approaches with her instrument and the spare strings the band utilized. Bassist Mathieu Santos will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new Ra Ra Riot feature.
Santos: I’d been waiting for this ever since I first saw the opening scene of Koyaanisqatsi. The wonderful Criterion Collection has just added Godfrey Reggio’s Qatsi Trilogy to their series, complete with all the bells and whistles you’d expect: All three movies and Philip Glass’s soundtracks have been painstakingly remastered, the packaging is gorgeous, and there are tons of new essays and mini-docs and special features and all that. It’s the entire human story in this little, pretty box, and it is astonishingly beautiful and heartbreaking, and I really mean that. I’ll never get tired of watching these films.
Video after the jump.
