INTERVIEW: Baths

American musician Will Wiesenfield has been making and performing music for more than a minute. Raised in Woodland Hills now residing in Chatsworth, California, he started out playing piano as a child, before learning the electronic music trade in his teens, and serving an apprenticeship of sorts though his early aliases, Post-Foetus and Geotic.

Adopting the moniker Baths in 2010, for the last couple of years he has been serving up an intoxicating blend of hazy beat production and emotional pop/RnB, both on record (through Anticon Records) and live on stages across the globe.

Described by The Guardian as sounding like, "J Dilla playing around with the Pavement and Prince catalogues", and drawing comparisons with the likes of Toro Y Moi, Bjork and Flying Lotus, his two albums, 2010's Cerulean and 2011's Pop Music/False B-Sides have placed him in some very cool quarters.

In celebration of his debut New Zealand performance, on Saturday the 23rd of October at San Francisco Bath House in Wellington, Rip It Up caught up with the man behind such jams as 'Maximalist', 'Halls' and 'Lovely Bloodflow' for a chat.

You’re finally coming to New Zealand for the first time, and we’re all very excited

Me too. It’s the lamest thing but it’s what I’ve been talking about to everybody! I’m also really excited to go because of the Lord of The Rings. My brother and I are into it. They’ve just released a new edition of Lord of The Rings that has like 40 hours of special features and we’re watching all of it. We’ve already watched 30 hours of footage of New Zealand and footage of people from New Zealand talking about the film!

It’s no different to New Zealanders seeing films from overseas. Most people here in their childhood would have seen movies like, say King Kong for example, with him climbing the Empire State Building in New York or whatever and gone ‘I want to go there one day!' You know?
Exactly!

Have you heard The Dream's new album 1977, under his Terius Nash alias?
No.

Do you listen to RnB?
Not so much actually, and that’s what’s kind of funny.  A lot of people think I would listen to R&B and hip hop and stuff, and I’m not very aware of those genres. I’m much more into experimental electronica and pop.

I'm disappointed, but that makes sense, often there is an inverse relationship between what we listen to and what we make.
Yeah, yeah. I’m not very good at tracing the lines of how it all works though. Lately I've been listening a lot to this group Azeda Booth. Their album In Flesh Tones came out in 2008, on Absolutely Kosher records. They’re very overlooked, but it’s one of the best albums I think I’ve ever heard.

So you like pop music and the avant-garde? Do you draw a distinction between the two?
I like to think that I don’t. I mean, my favourite music is the middle ground of those two things, like very experimental and very pop oriented and emotional. I think that like Bjork is my biggest inspiration. When I say experimental, I don't really mean noise though. I’m thinking of labels like 12k and a lot of very specifically digital electronic music, not so much loud noise.

Do you mean like that movie Avatar? Avatar level movie production, if you put that budget or effort into making an album?
Yes (laughs)

How long has the creation of music been an important part of your life?
Since I learned that I could do it, pretty much. I was classically trained on piano from about four ‘til 12. Then I had a bit of a falling out with music, and I didn’t want to play piano anymore and music didn’t seem like it made a lot of sense. That was because up until that time it was very mechanical, it was all just memorising motions and I didn’t understand that there was a way to emote with music properly.

After about year of not playing piano, I came back to it, and it was a completely different thing. It was very fulfilling to noodle around and to start putting together my own parts on the piano and learning to sing and all this other stuff and piecing it all together. From that point on, when I was 14 or 15 or whatever it was, it was all I wanted to do. I was sure by the time I was 15 or 16 years old that all I wanted to do with my life was record music.

When did you start working with electronic music equipment?
It all happened at the same time. It wasn’t like a functional step in that direction, it was literally how I started making music, because when I started recording just regular piano stuff I was recording lots with the computer. Immediately within that process I was messing around with it and putting effects on the piano and cutting it up and that sort of thing. It seemed very natural to me, that was all ingrained in the way I learned how to produce and write music, you know? It all happened all at once.

Out here we know you from your releases on Anticon Records, and I know you had a history before then, but for brevity’s sake, how did you connect with Anticon?
Daedelus (from Brainfeeder) really pushed my music in the beginning. He put in the right people's hands and really made an effort to have people listen to it. I owe a lot to him, he’s the one who showed them. We had a talk about how he was going to put it out, and he and I talked about Anticon and how it was going to be the best bet.

Baths - Lovely Bloodflow


By Martyn Pepperell

www.twitter/ BATHSmusic
www.bathsmusic.com

Baths performs in Wellington on the 23rd of October at San Francisco Bath House, with support from DJ Alphabethead, Glass Vaults, D:UNK and DJ Marek