Electronic music seems so foreign to me sometimes, I find it draining, the absence of musical instruments on stage and the whole knob turning business always give me the impression it’s fake and something just done to warm up the audience before the real music starts,… but I know, I’m old.
Will Wiesenfeld, aka Baths, who was playing at Amoeba last night, was bringing another component to that foreign language: vocals, yeah I don’t think these guys sing usually, but he was and his weird vocals, angelic-high-pitched at times, discordant at other times, were like a mid-karaoke-mid-Jonsi mash-up, with unexpected moves. Honestly, I could have gone without the vocals most of the time, but when they were good, they were melodious and the live performance was having its moments.
‘You guys are easy’ he said early in his set, he was often communicating with his public who was responding enthusiastically each time.
His watery, earthly, crispy beats were giving a lot of texture to his surprising compositions, and the sonic progression was always interrupted and constantly sawed by one of the numerous vibrations of his layered sound. It was giving an impression of chaos orchestrated by someone completely in charge.
It was strange and dense, busy and bizarrely not overly danceable for electronic music, more pop fueled by electronic than anything else, with climatic and unexpected parts. I have read that his sound is all him, as he does not use any prerecorded sounds or samplings.
For some of his songs it was as if his beats were going in wild circles in my head without going anywhere, as if something trapped in there could not escape and was turning crazy. But, if this constant sound-intensity variation, blood-sucking from the brain, blood-rushing to the brain, can be exhausting, it was always interesting because never predictable.
‘It’s about to get very gay’ he said towards the end, and he embarked into a more techno-beat number.
He got a technical problem in the middle of his set ‘Oh fuck what happened? Gimme a second, I’m a professional’… people were laughing, he was laughing as it was the second time he was joking about being a professional.
‘Cerulean’ is his debut album on Anticon Records, but Wiesenfeld has recorded many previous albums under other monikers like Post-Foetus.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rHLUujoj2g