Will Wiesenfeld has been making music in various guises since his teens, both with his band [post-foetus] and his ambient music project Geotic, but it is his one-man chillwave identity Baths that has made the biggest splash. Working with Ableton, an Akai MPD32 MIDI controller and microphone, Will conjures a soundworld of chopped up acoustic sounds, synth washes and crisp chunky beats, suggesting a poppier-Daedelus or a way less jazzy Flying Lotus. Totally Dublin had a chat with Will about his music, ambitions and live set-up in anticipation of his debut Irish show in the Workman’s Club on Friday 29th April. (Tickets are €18.45)
How are you?
I’m good. I’m driving back to LA right now, so I’m in California in the desert but I have an earpiece on so I’m not being dangerous or anything
Are you coming back from a gig or are you playing outside the city?
I played Austin, TX. I played at Stubbs with Cold War Kids two nights ago and then I’m driving back to Los Angeles, I get one night and one morning with my family and then I take a plane to France and then I start a tour in Europe
So were you in Austin for SXSW?
Yes in March a couple of weeks ago and I played 13 shows.
That’s intense. I suppose that’s the benefit of having a one man show, you can just haul up anywhere. Were there any bands you saw in SXSW that you loved?
I didn’t get the opportunity to see that many because I was playing so much, but the bands that I was playing with on a couple of the dates I’m so in love with. Both Braids, Gobble Gobble and also Cloud Nothings. We sort of became a weird unit with each other and we all love each other’s music so that was very cool. I think that’s honestly maybe all the bands saw cos I was moving around so much.
Obviously I wasn’t over there but a friend of mine told me a lot of good things about Ava Luna.
Oh yeh, they actually reached out to me. One of the girls from Ava Luna said hello to me and we hung out for a second, they seem really nice. I didn’t actually get to see them play, but I’ve heard they’re rad.
Let me talk about your music for a while. Can you explain about the new album you’ve released, Pop Music/False B-Sides?
Its technically not even out yet, its just something I was selling on tour that somebody immediately uploaded so its been circulating the internet a little bit but it doesn’t have an actually release yet. That’s gonna be April, when its going to be released digitally and its just, I don’t want to use the word compilation, but it’s a collection of songs that happened after Cerulean that aren’t, for me, next album material. Its just stuff that happened that I had been recording in the meantime and that I wanted to put out there. A couple of them have been on blogs but a number of them are completely unheard.
So I was thinking, basically, B-Sides don’t exist anymore, because most people don’t really release singles any more, properly, so it’s the continuation of the spirit of the B-Side where you have a different focus, or less focus.
That’s exactly what it is. All the songs are weird little take-aways of things and ideas that I didn’t maybe bring to full fruition. They were never actually released as B-Sides, hence the name False B-Sides but its that mentality of songwriting. That’s what all of those are.
I really like the song Flux, it was the harshest thing you’ve done so far.
Yeah, I’m actually performing that one with the live set so in Ireland I’ll be doing that one.
I want to ask you about your live show. From what I’ve seen, its still a one-man show?
It’s a one man show for now and for this tour in Europe but the next album is being built towards having a band that’s the whole idea behind it. This first album Cerulean was written and constructed with the whole idea of doing a show with just me a MIDI controller and a microphone and its working pretty well.
Was it important to you have a very visceral and very obvious thing that you’re doing on stage to make it seem more like a traditional instrument?
Well yeah, the whole thing is just me by myself so I have to have a very big presence and physicality in me performing because I have to fill up the entire room with just the sound of the performance.
You said you’d always had that intention to do a one-man and his laptop and MIDI controller kind of show. Was there any particular reason?
I wanted that in terms of portability for everything because I knew that starting off, at least in starting my career I needed to be able to do it by myself so I could tour easily and I could get to places like Europe and go all over the place and not have to worry about trying to sustain four other people. And in doing it this way I’m able to actually remain financially independent, not have a job while I’m making music, I can just make music and earn enough from it support myself and support going to places and touring and to save up for the next record and be able to actually make enough money to support a band once I’m ready to. And that’s the whole scope of what’s happening and it works out perfectly. I have the sustenance to make the next album with a band and tour with the band.
It makes a lot more sense and it’s the reason you can play 13 shows in Austin.
That was basically a mistake! The way I did SXSW I’m never going to do again. I’m never gonna play 13 shows again, I’m gonna do 2 maybe 3. It was ridiculous.
What are the plans for the band? What sort of lineup would you like to incorporate?
I have no idea at this point. It’s completely theoretical. I have outlines for the songs and sonic ideas in my head and sketched songs, 2 or 3 songs that have been recorded that are leading in the right direction but nothing exists yet so I can’t say, I have no idea. I can’t talk about it and say that these things are happening when nothing is actually recording.
The idea is that you want to play with other musicians rather than you have a certain sound in mind.
Well I’m still writing 100% of the material, it’s more that I just want the larger sound and the larger presence of a full band, because that’s how I write music and that’s how I see it happening. Whereas for Cerulean, I felt like being more independent. For my older moniker, [post-foetus], I had a six-piece band, I had a cellist, a guitarist, a bassist, drummer, an additional vocalist and myself doing singing and keyboard shit. That’s what I’m used to and I come from bands and I come from songwriting and that’s what I’ve always wanted with electronic music is to have band that is band, essentially four more people in an actual large performance.
You said, you come from bands, you come from songwriting so I how do you construct the songs from Baths? The sampled material, where does all that come from?
The first Baths album I went into it with the focus of it being a more beat-orientated album so I had that in my ehad while I was making all of it, but in terms of writing music in terms of Baths and Geotic and my old stuff [post-foetus] stuff all of it is the same open-endedness for everything. A song never comes together in the same way. I’ve had songs where I wrote the whole thing based on a word, like the title of the song and then I constructed all of the music and all of the lyrics around that but I’ve had songs that started from a sonic idea like a repetitive rhythmic thing or recording a bass guitar but having it all treble and then lyrics come afterwards. So its never the same thing, and that’s sort of the fun of it. The influence for how something can start comes from anywhere.
So you’d record all the different parts that you would cut up yourself?
On Cerulean, everything is me, except for the weird vocal samples from youtube, but all the music is 100% me. As things happen with the song, it depends on the song, what order everything comes together. There were some where I built the rhythm first and then started constructing a musicality around that. Like with the song ‘Plea’ that entire song started with the idea of recording an electric guitar unplugged, dry, with a mic very close to guitar so it sounds very tinny and weird. And then I made layers and layers of that and then reverbed it a lot and made it into this wash and that just how that song came together. And then I wrote the bassline, and the rhythm came after that and the lyrics happened around all the things I made for it.
Do you ever find sitting down to work on the laptop, not knowing exactly where things are going, to be frustrating or frightening?
No not at all. The open-endedness is a comfort zone for me. Its different for everybody but certain bands and artists find that sort of intense or overwhelming when its starting from nothing whereas some artists like to start with a sample and then they have something to work from and a direction. But the complete blank canvass of making music, especially in electronic music, is such a thrill to me. Not being restricted to having exactly, guitar/bass/drums and a singer, the traditional rock band thing, where you can incorporate any sound that exists and not think twice about it or worry about categorizations – I can just record anything that exists! With electronic music I’ve started to think of it as an umbrella philosophy for how to make music not even so much as a genre because within electronic music there’s so many different genres that its almost a different form of popular music and a different way of putting the music together. It covers too much ground to even be called a genre anymore.
Its funny, the last guy I interviewed said exactly the opposite to you – that the complete openness of electronic music didn’t mean anything to him until it had a philosophical root to it.
Oh wow. That’s interesting. Well my upbringing and the way I was introduced to music heightens the way I write it because I’m from a very, very cut-and-dried suburban neighbourhood. There’s not a lot of creative stuff happening around where I live or around where I grew up or anything like that. Like, artists were very mechanical, doing a lot of landscapes and stuff. When I was in school I wasn’t exposed to a lot of music and it was when I found Björk, it was the most alien, crazy, outlandish thing I’d ever heard and that immediately became my direction and goal in life and how I live and everything that I wanted to absorb. It was just as different as possible. So all of that is a comfort. The more outrageous and different something is to me, the more intriguing it is, the more I’m open to it.
Its kind of fascinating. I think his background was different to yours in that his dad was an artist too rather than coming from the white-picket-fence suburbia. You both approach the same concept of freedom in electronic music completely differently.
Would you like to talk about any other art from a different medium that influences Baths’ music and Will’s music in general.
Yeah, I’m a huge fan of animation and David O’Reilly is one of my favourite animators and I watch a lot of weird Japanese cartoons and that’s actually another whole separate realm of goals in my life – to be to, at one point, come together and create a show, a weird animated series. That’s a whole other thing that I could get into and geek out about but I think its easier to just say that I love that stuff!
Words: Ian Lamont
