Articles of 2010

Yep so Albums of 2010 went wrong because of a portable hard drive and floor collision. Damn. I could just reproduce my list of 75, but that would be boring and pointless and if there's two things I don't like to think I'm being, it's those.

However it's always nice to indulge myself in looking over my favourite band interview features of the last year. There's been some ace ones too. Cover wise I finally got my friend Frank on Playmusic Pickup, signalling only his second cover (after Kerrang!). I got to interview Deftones finally, giving them a cover, and there's been plenty of excellent insight from Marnie Stern, Baths, The National and Field Music.

So let's see what I got up to in 2010: in alphabetical order.


Baths AKA Will Wiesenfeld. A bright, enthusiastic and bluntly honest lad. Refreshing and fantastic and it's entirely reflected in his utterly brilliant music, best represented by Baths' debut album Cerulean. Of course, like all features, this has been edited from the original conversation - which was a blast, and very candid on both of our parts. This, however, is the unedited text before it hit Playmusic Pickup in the December 2010 issue.

Liquid Love

Baths is the solo project of 21 year old Will Wiesenfeld, Cleveland's shy electronic lothario. Once a classical music student, his past has helped fuel his desire to open his heart and pour it into music. He reveals all to Brad Barrett...

The emotional connection we have with music is why we engage with it. Any other reason is secondary, or at least should be in my opinion. Dance music of late, has tended towards the evocative where passionate embraces are perhaps more important than mere body movement conducted by cleverly-constructed beats. Will Wiesenfeld, AKA Baths, remains the pinnacle of this attitude as we head into the new year; his underrated homemade debut Cerulean, released earlier in 2010, proving a huge highlight of the last 12 months. It's a rapturous blur of clogged beats, echoing piano melodies, Will's disarming falsetto and unexpected clashes of hyper-tense electro melodies and ethereal instrumentation.

“In terms of using samples, I don't use any. Maybe a drum sample of a bass drum hit, for instance, but then I layer a hundred different things on top of it and make my own sound out of it and the construction of the actual rhythms is all my own,” he says. “The less I start out with, the more open ended it can be and the more comfortable I am. It's like I don't have to abide by any rules, I can do whatever I want. It's easier when I can throw a thousand ideas around and narrow it down to the right things,” explains Will at the City Arts and Music Bar above the basement venue he'll play a few hours later.
This open field he's bringing to our attention is a way of getting away from implied emotions. Rather than building a sad song from a minor key or a happy song from a major key, Will leaves ambiguity in his melodies and propels them to the desired emotional pitch with rhythms and textures which accentuate the sensual mood.
“I really wanted to make something easier to digest than my older material,” he says, referencing his band [post-foetus] and his Geotic side project. “but that is very, very positive and spirited and happy at the same time. That's the whole vibe of the album even though there's more personal and intense subject matter, it's told through a positive lens and feels more reminiscent than directly linked and depressing.”

Will manages to sum up his own music exquisitely. Describing Baths as “intentionally of the moment” and “what I actually want to put out in the world and my main artistic expression”, it's clear that it's a world away from his derivative, ambient Geotic material, which he creates almost purely to help him sleep.
“I used Digital Performer and Ableton Live and I just used a bunch of instruments. I'm lucky enough to have an upright piano in my bedroom, it's the family piano from when I was, like, four. I used an electric guitar, electric bass, my brother's acoustic guitar, a lot of singing, layers of vocals. With the construction of beats and stuff, there's a little bit of samples - maybe two or three percent across the whole album that's like actual drummer library samples - but the rest of those rhythms are all blurry with layers and sounds I put on top of it and the rest is stuff I did in my bedroom: snapping my fingers, clicking on the table, closing and opening doors. I'll record tonnes of layers of that type of stuff and then have to eliminate them. Trial and error and a lot of split second decision making.”

The incredible Hall, coincidentally a name I associate with love and joy in my life – something Will is happy to hear about and discuss, being the adorable chap that he is - begins a cut-up, aquatic burst of burbling voices before breaking into a loop-driven, modern gospel chorus that's more swan-dive beautiful than anything else you've heard in 2010. Plea, as well, is an otherworldly luminescence on the unexpectedly beautiful face of electronica, while You're My Excuse to Travel sprinkles that gorgeous family piano throughout in eloquent fashion. It's truly an album to grasp and hold tight. Considering his beginnings though, it could've turned out very different and perhaps sewn with far more blatant virtuosity.
“I was classically trained from the age of four until about 12 on piano and then I sort of had a falling out with classical music and couldn't stand it any more. The way I was playing piano was so rigid and robotic and completely devoid of emotion. I was playing music that, of course...the composers when they wrote it was a very, very emotional experience for them, but none of that was being communicated to me,” he explains, perhaps reflecting the lives of other kids whose parents urged them to be musical. “I took a break from that and when I started playing again, maybe a year and a half later, I only played my own music and only played what I wanted to play and I was like 'Oh music is thrilling!'” he says, adopting a gushing tone. “At that point in time it had become a horrible, tiresome thing but I wouldn't trade that experience. The spinal memory and the motion in my fingers is something I would never have had otherwise. I owe it all to the fact that I had that training and now I'm able to make ideas come out as fast as they do...because that's all it is. Technical proficiency is just a tool to make writing music easier.”

Will makes an amazing case for really learning your chosen instrument, though it's unlikely that without his revelation he would've embarked on an album which he hopes – rather sweetly - will help him “to look into someone who might be the right person.” He calls the album “crazy romantic” and it's in evidence not just in the lyrics - “Smile for me if you can/I wanna see that in my head” or “Boy you are every colour/How am I visible?/Please tell me you need me” - but in the scaling melodies, the cloudy and dream-like shimmering, the pulse-setting rhythms that occupy the core and prevent any deviation from the surging burst of feeling that erupts from within. Even the extraneous and playful noises throughout cross the lines between doubt and hope, anxiety and devotion. Cerulean sums love up in pure sound.
Certainly though, Will's ambition is to keep Baths consistently different and hearing a new song played later at Camp Basement in Old Street, the next Baths album will be crushing and oppressive or lustful and angry as opposed to tenderly hugging and kissing. But never again can you imagine his music being anything other than purely expressive and an extension of his very being, never becoming just a playground for his dormant expertise.

Brad Barrett