by RAF KATIGBAK

It's 6 p.m. in Orlando, Florida, and Evan Mast is starving. Tonight is one of only a few precious days off that he and Ratatat bandmate Mike Stroud have had on their month-long touring schedule. Now all they want is something a bit tastier than super-processed truck-stop grub. "We've spent the last, like, two hours trying to find a restaurant," says keyboardist/bassist/beatmeister Mast, exhausted. "There's very little around."

Mast has his work cut out for him. Florida's never really been synonymous with fine dining, but a decade ago it did put another sensory explosion on the map - death metal. In the mid-'90s, the Sunshine State was home to groups like Malevolent Creation, Death and various bands with more umlauts than a German phonebook.

If you heard their bold, genre-bending, instrumental, arena-rock-meets-baroque-meets-skittery-electro-hip-hop self-titled debut album, you'd assume that Ratatat should know all about Florida's rich metal legacy. After all, listening to Mast and Stroud riff triumphantly on their respective axes, you might think that the Brooklyn-based duo were bona fide experts in all things teased, spandexed and shredded.

Of course, you'd be wrong. "We were never really into metal until recently," reveals Mast almost coyly. "When we recorded the album, some friends were showing us stuff like Slayer that we were kind of getting into. But it wasn't something we were consciously trying to do."

What Ratatat ended up doing was recording their own playful sci-fi melding of disparate musical worlds. A little bit of Timbaland's meticulous beat architecture, a little bit of quirky electro synth-work and a whole lotta old school - when I say old school, I mean some serious baroque-type shit. "A lot of the metal stuff, if you slow it down and listen to the melodies, shares a lot with classical stuff," says Mast. "I actually heard about some metal guys ripping off classical songs. But we both listen to classical music and Mike actually studied it in school. In the end, we listen to loads of different things and it just kind of gets filtered through - what we do is a lot more simplified than classical."

With Mouse on Mars and Junior Boys at Cabaret
on Tuesday, Oct. 26, 9 p.m., $16.50

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