Beauty In The Breakdown: Baths On His New Indie Rock Album 'Gut'
Will Wiesenfeld (Baths) on his new album, his approach to production, and why he's not a gear-head
This is the series that started life as Nothing Deep To Say, with an Imogen Heap-homaging name change that better reflects the direction it’s taken. I’m also changing my other series The Depths to Something Deep To Say, because I don’t want to name anything I do after an Interpol b-side.
The government may not let me change my name anymore, but I can at least change my newsletter series’ name, I guess? I just wrote about Sam Fender’s People Watching over on Pitchfork and had thoughts, as I apparently often do on British men.
I’m so happy to get this issue out – there are some interviews from as far back as October I haven't been able to publish until now due to other things I'm working on/general life things. Piglet, Allie, and more are all on the way.
Baths is the electronic project of Will Wiesenfeld. He’s a highly influential queer electronic musician who combines his chilly, clipped sounds with startlingly intimate songwriting. For a decade, he’s wanted to make a rock album, and getting into acts like Gilla Band and Protomartyr inspired him to make the leap. Besides Protomartyr and Alligator-era National, I also thought of the 70s post-punk band the Raincoats who similarly incorporated strings into their off-kilter art rock.
I was considering breaking down “Homosexuals” for the album, which is my favorite (and also this is a queer newsletter lol), but “American Mythos” is an ideal balance between his more electronic music and the new live direction.
I didn’t tell him this - though I suppose he’ll read it now - but the haunting double-life song “Human Bog” from his previous record Romaplasm kept me company when I was semi-closeted in college during Trump 1.0. So this is a particularly special issue. While he's done technical interviews before, he'd never fully broken down a song, so I'm grateful he agreed to be on this here newsletter.
How did you get into self production?
I had a big falling out with classical music and learning on piano, but when I came back to it, I could just make up whatever I wanted, play whatever I wanted, and that was infinitely more satisfying. And so that almost immediately translated to my parents recognizing that, I'm making up a lot of stuff on the piano, I should have a way of documenting it. So my dad went, “let's get you a keyboard.“
And so I got hooked up with Digital Performer to start with, which is crazy, because it's professional. My dad thought, oh, they made the Lord of the Rings soundtrack on this, so you should use it. And I was like Jesus, okay. And so a friend of his got me started, showed me how to record MIDI and mess around with it. I had a crash course of less than a day, learning how to use it.
I just had to figure out everything on my own. There was no YouTube at the time, there was only the manual, and me trying to figure it out. So it was literally me making a million mistakes over the course of however, many years of just messing around with MIDI and Digital Performer and then slowly learning, oh, I can record audio too. Like I can record my voice and make a sound. And if I want a drum beat, I can [beatbox]. My relationship to production and recording and music technology was literally endless mistakes, doing everything wrong and backwards. I didn't even know what quantization was until maybe two and a half, three years into using that software and I have an entire record of unquantized Eurobeats.
With production, I didn't have a teacher, I just sat with it and messed around for a really long time. I did the “wrong” way of making music in Digital Performer. I still prefer it, because I have more of an understanding and breakdown of how I do things by doing everything by hand. Very bespoke, you could say.
I’d love to talk about developing your sound – specifically the clipped percussion.
I'm very vocal about the fact that I often hate really reverberated drums, or any percussion recorded in a wide space. I like things to be super tight and super rigid, which is that kind of post-punk influence, or whatever it is that's just a sound I've always been attracted to, even when it comes to my older records with a lot more electronic elements.
I want everything to sound really naked and really empty, that it's just the sound of the drum as tight as possible and as short as possible.
The sharp transients are such a brain-scratching sound.
I mean also my school of thought comes from experimental electronic music, where so much of it was just those super cut up Vespertine-style micro beats of just like little clips of broken audio. And then even working with Digital Performer, when I was learning how to use it. I also liked learning how to break it.
There were options you could set up where it highlights every single transient in a region, every peak of the audio. [HANNAH NOTE: hey, that's where the newsletter name comes from!] And then from there, I just collapsed all of the audio, by dragging it from right to left so that it only had literally the shortest possible increment for each of those regions. And it just sounded like static. It was just all these weird little cut-up sounds.
And I would do layers and layers and layers of that to make really weird sounding like clicky, fucked up electronic stuff. And it was me mimicking all my heroes at the time, where I was obsessed with Alva Noto, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and Lali Puna, and all these folks who just did really cool experimental electronic beat work, I want to try that. So that's still where I come from.
I'm curious how that translates to this album, because it's more based in live instrumentation.
Aesthetically, it’s a more live band sound, but my process is the same as I would have for any other record, where some things are broken up into lots of different little regions or sections. The only biggest difference is when you're tracking drums or strings. In certain instances, sometimes you have a much longer region [in Ableton], because you have a player playing drums all the way through, and then you have stacks of those regions that are all the different mic setups for when you're recording a drummer. So you might have 10 tracks that are all, a minute long. Oh, here's the live drums as one thing. But some of the songs were built out of live drum samples that I then still stitched together and constructed the way I wanted to construct them.
I found an old Pitchfork interview from a decade ago where you mentioned doing a live-sounding album. You've said this one’s been done for a while, but why now?
For this record, I sort of had to reckon with the fact that I am just as inspired, if not more, inspired, at this point in my life by music that is very rock based, or guitar-drums-bass based. Then I’ve been into electronic music. I am still inspired by everything. I'm all over the map musically, but I hadn't personally made the effort of making a record that reflected my passion for that stuff. And so it kind of just came to a head with the amount of post-punk noise rock stuff that I was really into, where I needed to funnel that into something.
I need to make something that feels like I'm pulling from this whole other world of music that I love and that is still going to be my weird, bullshit filter of whatever it is that I also like and I'm gay about, to make a thing that feels honest for my influences and my spirit at the time. It's not exactly a live sounding record. There's still electronic elements and there’s still all these other things - I can't help myself. I'm just going to do what I want.
You have a tour coming up with Fashion Club opening; how do you plan to do this live?
Doing it live is the ultimate challenge. For the tour, I still have to do it as one person. I still have to do it solo. It is literally not financially viable for me to do the tour with a band right now, I can't make it work. So the challenge is the same challenge as ever. How do I make it as interesting as possible and fun for me as possible.
I’ve gotten the advice of “oh, you should just get a drummer.” There's an element of that that doesn't work for me - I feel like there's so much you are going to lose from a lot of spontaneity. I'm very protective or controlling about my own sound. I needed to have the songs delivered in a comfortable enough emotional capacity, where me performing them feels right. And if it doesn't feel right with just the one drummer, I couldn't do that.
I’d love for you to talk about the lyrics in the context of the production, though I get that it's hard without getting too personal - the series [was] called Nothing Deep To Say.
Well, that's it's hard for me, because everything I'm trying to do all the time is up against an emotion. That's how I make music.
The idea for this newsletter came from someone, I think Laura Jane Grace, saying they'd rather talk about gear than music.
I am known among my peers as being the complete opposite of a gearhead. I have very little affinity for stuff. I just don't like stuff. I will get geeky about VSTS, and every now and then I'll find something really cool. But my favorite piece of gear in the world is still this Keith McMillan indestructible, gargantuan piece of hardware that’s just a MIDI controller. All these pads are XY sensitive. It's super, super on the go. You can throw it in the backpack without the case, and it'll still last you eight years, and it's $100. So for me, this is literally the most accessible piece of gear I've ever encountered. That's when I'll get really geeky about a piece of gear.So much of what people get really in the weeds about when it comes to sound design and production and gear is so much more boring to me than the journey of trying to guess how to get there. That's my entire production ethos – my biggest white whale, in terms of production, is the distortion from the Orgy cover of Blue Monday. That is maybe one of my favorite sounds in the entire universe. And I've spent my entire working career pretending to get close to that in a bunch of different songs.
I know someone who has that with a snare sound in “Human Bog”! [HANNAH NOTE: shout out Tim of Water Gun Water Gun Sky Attack. I honestly also have that with the snares in “Human Bog” though]
That’s so cool that I’m somebody’s ‘thing.’ That's the fun of production, is everybody being fans of everybody else, and just wanting to experiment and try things. That’s why I'm not so much of a gear head, because I think if there's a singular answer to getting an exact thing you're looking for, it's often just less fun if you're doing it straight up with gear, even though it can be a great tool.
But more than that, it's just expensive and it takes up physical space that I don't have.. My brain is already way too cluttered, so if I'll gather stuff, if it's digital I'll get VSTS and whatever. But I'm not going to get crazy about physical gear. I just couldn't do it. I don't have the space for it.
I'm more saying ‘gear’ as shorthand for being nerdy.
I’m kind of projecting here about my own weird shit, but I'm sure I'm not the only one. I do know people who are very into gear and can get deep about it, and they often have the same philosophy as me, where they're like “sometimes it's great, sometimes I don't need to go that far into it, whatever”.
“American Mythos”
At what point are you adding lyrics into the process?
I'll often have lyrics come late in the process, because as I'm creating a song, it's sort of telling, emotionally, what it is and how it feels. For "American Mythos", it feels aggressive in a pop way, kind of angry. A lot of the lyrics I was putting together for this song felt mean, and I held on to that feeling of if this feels mean, I'm going to keep these lyrics mean - "your friends are stupid, you're boring", all this other stuff that's really awful but made sense for the song. At the end, I'm going "I hate it all" over and over, and whether that's about a person, the country, about myself, it's just a smearing of all of it. On the vocal for the outro, I'm just repeating "I hate it all, I hate it all". It's very obfuscated, because it's way more about the emotional feel of the music than it is a need for you to hear every word I'm saying. Listening to the outro, the vocals are way less in the mix here.
SYNTH:
I was just running a synth through some processing and distortion, because I had this idea in my head of 2000s rock music like Tokyo Police Club. Just a very synthy sound and a drum set.
It was my Casiotone run through a bunch of distortion, or if not, was a really simple wavetable synth from Ableton. A lot of the time I use really simple sine waves and square waves. I don't have a lot of I don't have a lot of expensive synths, or expensive synth VSTS. But I do have Ableton Suite. As you'll get to know very quickly, with my process, a lot of the time, I will do things and amalgamate them and change things here and there to the point where I don't know where I started anymore. I won't be able to tell you exactly what's happening, but I'll be like “I think it was this thing? So that just happens, because the way I produce is in a flow state. I am not taking the time to organize well or construct well, though I've gotten better at that.
DRUMS:
There's a lot of kicks, but the kicks are kind of stretched out and high past so that they just kind of sound like weird electronic elements, just gross and probably pitched up. I started pitching them in different directions. The intro beat is a mimicry of what happened with the live drums.
So I don't have any preciousness for remembering exactly what I used, which is probably going to get me in trouble, but that's fine. So I had the synth part, and then the idea was “Okay, I want a drum part that is cool and interesting and goes along with this. But being that this was such a sort of performed drum part, I had a weird kind of backwards way of wanting to construct it. So I had my friend Casey Dietz come in for a day, and we recorded from Phil Hartunian at Tropico Beauty Studios.
I basically said to him, "here's what I have so far", which was just that synth loop, an I said. “I’m gonna loop this, and I want you to just play whatever you want for five minutes straight through the whole course of this. Just literally make shit up. Don't think about it. Just have a fun time.” Because he's fucking amazing, it was exactly what I was hoping it would be, where tried a bunch of different things.
So I took this line of improv inspiration that he had, and I just sat there and I created a skeletal drum beat out of just the pieces that I liked, so most the way you would imagine sampling a vinyl record to put it into a dance track. And just taking slivers of things that are interesting to you, I took slivers of his improv and constructed a new drum beat, then I took four bars out of it. I said, Okay, Casey, here is the drum beat. I like what you did in these exact moments. Can you play this back? Then he figured it out phenomenally fast and we did our takes of him recording that new drum beat.
I gated the shit out of these drums. I put gates on everything - on every track, there’s a gate and an EQ. I shape the drums to where I want them, then gate to take out as much room sound as possible. I want it to be as tight and tiny and succinct drum hits as possible. So it was that it was gating the shit out of every single stem that I have, these ones.
And you’re using standard Ableton plugins!
I'm most of the time, I would say 80% of the time I'm using standard Ableton stuff. I only have, I don't have that many VSTS, but I have stuff from AberrantDSP. They named a reverb preset after one of my songs!
VOCALS:
The vocals are fairly highly compressed, because it's a very aggressive performance for the vocals, especially later on in the song. So the level of compression allows me to have a lot more dynamics [in the performance]. I get to kind of half scream on some of the notes, and it kind of doesn't blow itself out. But the fun of it is in producing, riding this delay in the production.
It's literally just one delay that I turn it on, wipe it around, and then turn it off, and then I have it come in on a bunch of other random notes.
I have it come in on a bunch of other random notes, but less random and more, where's it going to emotionally bend to the way I want it to feel. It's another one of those things that's harder to express because I'm not doing it randomly. I'm doing it to follow the impact of how I think it should feel, whereas the eye by itself is really, really dry. If I were to turn the delay off, it's just a little less weird, and I needed it to stay weird.
PIANO:
I read that you record piano parts live. Was that true here?
It's the family piano that I've had for forever. I guess at this point, it's probably almost my whole life, because that's the piano I learned on when I was four, and my brother was six, and I'm 35 now. I get it tuned and it sounds excellent.It is an absolute gift to be able to just have one and use it and record with it. I don't use it enough, frankly, or play it enough, but it's great.
In the context of this song, a lot of the song with the kind of synth part that's already in there, and it kind of being whatever it is, an eight bar, maybe 16 bar loop. It's sort of one thing the whole time, but then the feelings in the song just get more aggressive and more complex, and then fall apart in this way where I thought the piano part should start to mimic the confusion of this whole outro part - the only thing that felt good was when the repetition wasn't exactly right.
That was really fun for me trying to play a piano part that moved like that and felt really weird. So I did a bunch of passes. That's what I'm always asking myself, is this weird enough yet?
I ask this about a lot of people I interview - if you have a normal song, do you get restless about it?
If I am listening to a song that only allows itself to be normal with nothing else that kind of takes you further than that, my interest waivers much faster, and that makes me really nervous as a person making music. I love being able to come back to something because I rediscover things about it, and it feels different when I'm paying more attention to more things.
Obfuscating or adding weirdness to a song that feels otherwise normal is a very healthy part of how I make and think about music, and all of my favorite music is just wrong enough, just weird enough outside of something that might otherwise be recognized as being really easy pop. But I think that's also true of the best pop music in the world, that it's fucking weird. I think that's part of it. I have a lot of philosophies in all different directions. But for me personally, when I'm making music, it is very, very difficult as Baths, to make a song that is too straightforward, I have to make it weirder.
STRINGS:
Note: this was processed with RX to take out Will's speaking - my apologies for any artifacts!
I was really excited to ask you about this, I had to mix a string quartet for a song I worked on last year and it was so hard.
I was having that problem, where I was trying to mix the strings and it just was not landing for me. For a lot of the record, it was feeling this way with different songs, I would try it on, I was like, that's not really enough. And then I doubled the recording of the quartet, layering multiple passes. So basically it was like hearing eight string instruments versus just the four. And it was perfect. I was like oh my god, this is just filled in enough, but it's not an orchestra, it still feels like a quartet.
Months after, I saw this documentary of Bjork’s Homogenic, one of my favorite albums of all time. And that was her treatment of the strings as well on that record, to double them so it became basically an octet. And it must be because I'm so obsessed with Homogenic, and it's been such a biblical force in my life that that's what my ears needed. They needed a double quartet for it to feel normal, which is really funny to me, that that happened after the fact.
All of the strings were all at Tropico Beauty, all in one day. It was the craziest day ever. I had arranged all of the string parts ahead of time, and then Isaura String Quartet, who I've worked with forever, blasted out eight songs in one day, which is crazy, but they're so good and it turned out great. So much of my process is figuring out as I'm doing it - I don't come into it with a predisposed this is how I've got to attempt it.
Are you treating the individual tracks at all?
They're totally naked, and both passes are totally naked. And then the grouping of the strings is the only place I put effects. So you're hearing them all together.
Do you have sheet music?
I basically played all the parts in that I wanted as MIDI and transferred the MIDI files to Finale. I had made Finale versions of all the different MIDI parts that I had played, and arranged it as best as I could. But that's what's so good about working with the same folks you always work with, is because they know what I like strings to sound like – I use words like "molasses" or "syrupy" a lot, meaning I don't like very clearly defined notes. I like when they're sliding and get a little off-kilter sometimes. And so a lot of these, even though it's very clear chord changes, they're not playing them in a really static way. I think other songs maybe showcase that a little more like the song "Verity" has a really clear kind of moment where each string instrument has this little solo, but it's only for one bar.
MASTERING:
Talk about mastering with Heba Kadry.
This was my first concerted effort at making something that could be construed as indie rock, but it's still me, it's still experimental. A lot of the records I love in that vein went through her, and it made sense to contact her. I'm really happy I went with her, and she was very patient with me, because I had certain ideas of how I wanted a build a sound and delivered in its emotional intensity, that in the way I mixed it didn't land correctly for having it run through mastering. It was a lot of going back and forth, with her explaining this is how this thing works, and I got it to a place where it worked, but it was not exactly where I had my mix when I first presented it to her. All my vocals had too much sibilance, and she asked if I was able to adjust that. I had to apply a DeEsser really late to the entire record. I think I did... a medium job of that, but she made it sound excellent despite that.
I wanted the vocals to be for the whole record, and especially this song, to be very direct and clear and present, but not to a pop music level of volume - not where it is overpowering the feel of the music. I still want them to sit in the right place.
Thanks for reading! Subscribe for more Beauty in the Breakdown – on the paid tier we also went into "Peacocking" and the working title for every song, and that will be up soon. <3
