Electro-pop quartet Classroom Battles embrace technology but never allow it to drown out the individual voices of the band. The members of the group — hailing from France, Ireland, and The United States — currently reside in a large house in Dublin where they compose and reconstruct threads of bright synths, piercing melodies, and expressive vocals, courtesy of lead singer Tigrane Minassian. They do so by pairing live instrumentation with studio software — in particular Ableton, of which producer/Classroom Battles cohort Martin Clancy is a certified trainer — and letting each, the synthetic and organic, feed off each other and unfurl into something more than the sum of its often disparate parts. On their upcoming debut EP, This Week’s Question (out today), the band creates waves of darkly melodic synth-pop that melds their penchant for distinctive analog instrumentation with a more circuit-based aesthetic.
With each member having a background in both the visual arts and music (between them, they’ve worked on Oscar winning movies, TV programs, and art installations), they’ve set out to make a video for each of the four tracks on This Week’s Question. They’ve already released the clip for “Call To Arms,” and now we have the stark black and white follow-up with “Cross-Eyed Horse.” Marrying reverberating synths, a driving percussion, and synthetic orchestral swells, the track creates a rhythmic momentum that pushes the song forward, with the accompanying images of running and passing landscapes helping to further this idea of action as a means of emotional conveyance. By the time the video ends, we’re left with the main character presumably alone standing along a vast stretch of empty road. The listener, like this man, is just waiting for the next musical push.
Beats Per Minute is pleased to premiere the video for “Cross-Eyed Horse” from Classroom Battles’ upcoming This Week’s Question EP.
