the view from here

Published in Dec. 3 edition of NME Magazine. Follow Rostam via his tumblr page.

You’ll know Rostam Batmanglij as the quiet one in Vampire Weekend, but now he’s blasting open a new musical world of his own. Hazel Sheffield heads to his apartment.

“What’s wrong with Jack Johnson?” says Rostam Batmanglij when NME asks about his dubious decision to remix a track by the king of campfires last year. “You think he’s not indie enough or something? Well, I have strong pop instincts! My pop instincts are so strong I have to suppress them!” To prove it, the Vampire Weekend man leaps onto his piano stool and starts bashing out the riff from ‘One Thousand Miles’ by Vanessa Carlton.

It’s always the quiet ones. If Rostam was once best known for hiding behind a keyboard in Vampire Weekend, those days are over. His list of projects is growing: from collaborative work with Ra Ra Riot’s Wes Miles as R&B outfit Discovery, to production for Das Racist and remixes for Johnson, Foreign Born and others under the moniker Boys Like Us. Next, Rostam is stamping his real name on a solo album of future sounds that he hopes will establish him as a genre-straddling creator, a rewriter of rules. Is this the next Brian Eno?

“Sometimes I close my eyes and imagine music unlike anything you’ve ever heard before,” says Rostam from the table of his minimalist white kitchen. “Then I’ll just quickly try to make it on my computer.” Outside, the rain is beating down so hard that his perfect view of the New York skyline is drowned in fog. A soggy film crew shooting in his street shout instructions at one another. This is DUMBO, aka Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass, the arty, riverside district of Brooklyn where Rostam spends his days.

We are in his warehouse apartment, carpeted with rugs from Iran (where his parents come from) and strewn with drawings, guitars and records by Coldplay and The National. In Rostam’s bedroom – which doubles as his studio – two beds take up one wall, and a piano, mixing desk and a huge computer are arranged against the other. There’s also a mini keyboard by his pillow, just in case he dreams up a new song in the night.

“I always want to push myself to make music that is more and more complex, even if it is more minimalist,” Rostam says as he queues up some of his solo stuff on ProTools for NME to have a listen.

Minimalist it is not. Of the two tracks posted on his blog this month, ‘Woods’ is a twinkling Bollywood fairytale, all sitars and dreamy vocals, while ‘Don’t Let It Get To You’ announces itself with drums like gunfire before a looping panpipe refrain. Two others yet to see the light of day swim in nostalgia, from the rattling choral intro of ‘Summer’ to potential single ‘Bike Dreams’, a fuzzy, sun-drenched number with a chorus that starts, “Two boys, one is laughing sweetly.”

He’s shy about outlining the solo plan in detail (“The announcement… it starts you down this whole road…” he says), but he’s happy to explain how he finds working as Rostam rather than Vampire Weekend. “In relation to ‘Contra’, even if I come up with a part of a song or I begin a song, by the nature of it being collaborative it changes everything,” he says. “It’s like cooking. Every individual ingredient affects how you taste the other ingredients. My songs – I envisaged them in a certain way that didn’t fit Vampire Weekend. Once the album’s out it will become obvious: ‘Oh, these songs live together.’”

Rostam has become fairly vocal about his homosexuality since he came out publicly to Rolling Stone in 2010 – and this attitude has guided his creativity, too. There was an interview with gay mag ‘Out’ in February of that year where he revealed that ‘I Want To Be Your Boyfriend’ from Discovery’s 2009 debut and ‘Diplomat’s Son’ from Vampire Weekend’s ‘Contra’ were both about gay relationships. Then a performance on U.S. talkshow ‘Saturday Night Live’ a month later where he wore a rainbow guitar strap, prompting gay blog Queerty to ask ‘Just how big of a gay artist will Vampire Weekend’s Rostam Batmanglij become?’
“That was an intense time for me,” Rostam says. Just behind him on the bookshelf sits a collection of coming out stories called ‘Boys Like Us’.

“I guess I didn’t want it to be something that would turn into tabloid fodder. But everyone was very supportive. I still have lady fans on Twitter. They say, ‘I don’t care if he’s gay, I love him anyway!’” he laughs. “So keep trying ladies! I’m kidding, I’m kidding. I’m gay.”

The desire to engage with the wider world more played a part in Rostam’s decision to sign up for a Converse ad campaign with Kid Cudi and Best Coast last year. He wrote the track ‘All Summer’ for the two artists to sing, and then had his face splashed over billboards at festivals across the world in a deal that must have brought in a few pennies.
“I didn’t do it for the money,” Rostam says. “I did it because I thought it was something kind of original, as an openly gay person, to do a song with a mainstream rapper. That’s never been done before. I guess in some ways I thought I was serving a higher purpose.”
Yes folks, Rostam’s thinking big. He’s started writing non-fiction, like his father, who writes books about Iran, and his mother, whose Persian cookbooks have made her something of a culinary celebrity. This month, Rostam wrote a piece of non-fiction for the first issue of ‘The World’s First Perfect Zine’, a new venture by ‘Pitchfork Reviews Reviews’ creator David Shapiro.

Then there’s his art. As Rostam talks, he flicks through some marker drawings, explaining that he wants to make 500 original sketches to go with each copy of his solo album. He’s even invented a couple of fonts that will fit on a USB stick for his fans to drop onto their computers.

“I want it to be a world you can step into,” he says of the album. “So you get various things from me.”

We’re already getting that. There’s a new Vampire Weekend album being prepped for release next year, about which Rostam is painfully coy. And there are plans to reunite with Wes
Miles for more r’n’b under the Discovery moniker, eventually. Though he won’t reveal anything about his plans as a producer, Rostam compares himself to electro producer Stuart Price who kept his many aliases – Jacques Le Cont, Thin White Duke – even when he hit the big time and started working with Madonna and Kylie Minogue.

But it’s the big E who really inspires him. “I like that Brian Eno got to a point where people didn’t wonder why he was doing what he was doing,” says Rostam. “I hope I’m known for just doing my own thing and not fitting into any kind of mould.”