Cartoons and breast-stroke: TLOBF meet Baths

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Last August Californian Will Wiesenfeld, aka Baths released his debut album Cerulean, and started touring the world with his sublime skittering laptop compositions. We caught up with him while he was back in the UK briefly, to talk about Cerulean, his plans for the next album, and why he just loves water.

Your album Cerulean came out last year and you’ve been back in the UK touring it again, how do you feel about the way people have received it live?

This time around it’s like most the people at the shows know the material, the first time it was sort of an experiment, and seeing if people would actually come. People are used to the songs now and like them a lot, and it’s a whole other layer of enjoyment. I don’t know, I’m not a great gauge of that, but I think it’s been a lot better this time round.

People have used a variety of different terms to describe your approach to music, do you feel that any of them were really accurate?

I like to say that it is song-writing from an electronic perspective. I’m rooted in listening to a lot of pop music, and Bjork is my biggest influence, but there are a lot of other aesthetic things happening on the album that make sense when people talk about them. I’ve been lumped in with chillwave stuff and with hiphop stuff, but it all makes sense for that album so it doesn’t turn me off.

I’ve read about your Bjork influence before and it relates to something that a lot of people have picked up on — a ongoing theme of playfulness in your music, because of your song titles like ‘<3’ and then ‘Aminals’. Is that something that happened naturally, because you’re that kind of person, or was it a more conscious approach with the music making?

More of the second. I want to attribute it to the fact that maybe I’m like super happy all the time, but it’s more that I went into this album thinking of that aesthetic — that it’s very positive and playful. There is some darker subject matter, l more depressing things, but they’re told in a very happy place, a state of mind.

You started playing and recording music when you were very young didn’t you?

Yeah I played piano from ages four through twelve, then I had a falling out with it. I didn’t really know what I was playing and I was not emotionally invested in anything. I knew that wasn’t right, it felt horrible to me so I separated from it, and then when I came back to piano I just realised the fun in playing whatever I wanted. That is where music became this whole other magical thing to me and then the writing and everything fell into place.
That training is something that is invaluable to me because all the ideas I have, come out that much faster. I can just sit down and have something come into my head and just play it immediately – if I didn’t have that training I would be arguing with my fingers about how I’m supposed to play it. I think that musically my life has happened perfectly, like structurally the way everything turned out. I don’t want it any other way.

It’s interesting that you say it happened that way round, because when I read that you started playing music when you were four , I thought that maybe it was a sense of wonderment at music that you had then that remained and informed your music making now. But from what you say, that isn’t the case.

It was a reinvigoration, a renaissance for me. I had a crisis when I was twelve. At the time it was a very big step and it gave me the space I needed to come back to it.

It’s like you reached a level of maturity really early and then were reborn again as the childlike musical prodigy when you were older?

I’d like to think so,hopefully I guess, but I don’t know. It sounds very whimsical this way. Let’s say it was exactly like that…

…And of course there were like unicorns in the room and rainbows….

…Made of candy, yeah. Perfect.

You’ve been making music for a long time – playing since you were a child, and then recording as , it has been said though, that in your incarnation as Baths, is that something you would agree with?

I guess so, but the thing is — I think it exists differently in my head than it does in the rest of the world. I think of music album by album, and I already know that the next album is going to be extremely different to Cerulean – that it’s much darker. I’m going to have a lot of stuff going in to it before I ever start recording, whereas Cerulean was all just spur of the moment.
So, the way they say it, I guess that’s correct — greatest focus yet. It’s just the next stage for me, was just too complicated and weird of a name, so I just wanted something that was easier and Baths is the name I would like to ride out over my career. I think it’s a good name, I think it can last.

So any kind of focussing that you’ve done artistically, has been a conscious change of direction as opposed to a natural musical evolution?

Definitely – because it’s the first record I’m signed under , I made every effort that it be very poppy, accessible and easy to digest so that I can make room for more of the music that I want to make, that I feel is going to be closer to what I wanted to do.

It sounds like a very organised battle plan.

Yeah, it actually is, that’s why it’s weird. I’ve sort of planned all of this out. When it came time for me to make the decision about what music I needed to make within the next period of time, when it was September 2009, I just knew that I needed to make the type of album that Cerulean was at that moment in order to jump-start myself. And it worked perfectly.

Naturally you’ve been compared to a few different artists, but a name that kept coming up was Toro Y Moi, are you happy with that comparison?

Yeah, I don’t mind it at all. There’s definitely huge influences from his sound on some of the songs on the album, for sure, I can’t deny that, and that’s sort of like part of wanting to make an album that was of the moment in all of this sort of stuff. I listened to a lot of Cocteau Twins round the time that I was doing the album and a lot of weird reverby-ness and melodicism and that type of thing also float into it and of course the hip hop stuff and the larger beats and all of that, and the songwriting, it’s all over the place.

So I read Baths on Water which you wrote in September 2010 for the Quietus, on your love of water and I thought it was really interesting, especially when read alongside your music. You wrote how you like that water can exist and be lots of different things at the same time — is that sort of indefinability something you crave with music? Do you resent how difficult it is to achieve it because people are so keen to define you?

In a perfect world it would be the best thing ever if you only knew bands by the name of the band, by the albums they put out and if there weren’t genres everywhere. There are some artists that are like complete individual voices and completely unique, that immediately get likened to other things because there is one small similarity, that’s not fair to how hard they work and how good their music is. It’s just something you have to deal with, it’s part of the game. I’m really excited to do the next album because I think its going to be so different from what this one was, and its going to hopefully make it harder for people to draw those associations, which is the best. When it’s difficult for people to do that, that’s when you’ve nailed on something very special.

You also wrote how you like the visual aspects of water, and I thought that made sense in terms of your music, which often feels quite visual, or else multi-sensory.

Yeah, multi-sensory is a great word for it! I’d love to think that it’s like that. When I write music it’s definitely not note for note and sound for sound, it’s like a visual process. I’m not thinking about it like ‘now it’s time for guitar’, it’s what is going to fit how it feels, or what lyric is going to make this emotional sound make sense so it’s a lot more broad atmospheric vision of a song.

You wrote how there was no better feeling than swimming after experiencing a horrible sweatiness. I have to ask – what’s the pre-swimming shower protocol there?

That is what it was like when I had a pool in my house when I was a child, but in life yes I shower before I swim. I do still owe that to the world, that human beings don’t get my butt-grease every time I get in the pool.

I think you can probably learn a lot from someone from by what there swimming stroke of choice is, so what are you?

I guess it’s the breast stroke. It’s nice, relaxed and comfortable…and I don’t know any others.

Finally, back to the music – you’re finishing tonight in the UK, then you’re going back home, what are you going to do then?

Nothing. That’s all I’ve wanted to do for the past couple of weeks, nothing at all, maybe cartoons, but that still counts as nothing.

After the nothing?

There’s always after the nothing. I’ll start recording again, I don’t know. The magic is that I’m not sure yet, I can keep it a little open-ended for now, but I have lofty goals of finishing the album by December and setting up these other tours and stuff, but at the moment – thinking of the next two weeks – nothing.

Cartoons and breast-stroke?

Yes. Cartoons and breast-stroke.