Baths

Baths serves as the nuanced and personal electronic pop endeavor from Los Angeles-region producer Will Wiesenfeld, drawing audiences into atmospheric pieces shaped equally by imaginative realms and lived experience. His glitch-infused approach surfaced first on the 2010 album Cerulean, revealing a simultaneously gentle and demanding sensibility that grew more shadowed and purgative with 2013's Obsidian. The move toward heightened emotional resonance continued on 2017's Romaplasm and carried forward with the frequently confessional Pop Music/False B-Sides II in 2020.

A musician grounded in classical study, Wiesenfeld started creating music while young in Los Angeles. Piano training occupied him from age four until twelve, after which Euro-pop, trance, and IDM captured his interest as a teenager. Björk's catalog supplied his defining spark; while enrolled at Hamilton High School's music academy he acquired guitar, contrabass, and viola on his own. At the same time he refined a signature layered technique that folds sounds such as clicking pens and running water into electronics and acoustic instruments.

Wiesenfeld's earliest outlet, [Post-Foetus], issued The 1st Will Wiesenfeld EP in 2007. Ambient material under the Geotic name followed the next year. He soon introduced the Baths alias, chosen to reflect his fondness for long baths, and an invitation from like-minded producer Daedelus to appear at the L.A. club Low End Theory led to regular performances there and a 2009 signing with Anticon Records.

The 2010 calendar proved especially active: remixes for Fol Chen, Shlomo, and Rafter appeared alongside [Post-Foetus]' album The Fabric and Geotic's Mend, while Cerulean, Baths' debut full-length captured by Wiesenfeld in his bedroom across a few months, also arrived. Its enveloping textures and fragile melodies earned notice, prompting the 2011 release of Pop Music/False B-Sides, a set of outtakes and previously unheard tracks. Remixes for Gold Panda, Son Lux, and one of his preferred artists, Lali Puna, surfaced around then, along with collaborations involving Daedelus and Dntel among others.

Months of serious illness kept Wiesenfeld bedridden in 2012. That stretch, together with his reading on the Dark Ages and a wish to perform with a full band, shaped the 2013 album Obsidian, a more direct and cathartic collection that reached number 15 on Billboard's Top Dance/Electronic Albums. Work with Ryan Hemsworth and Flying Lotus also occurred that year. In 2014 Baths delivered a remix of Grizzly Bear's "Will Calls" and the Ocean Death EP, which extended Obsidian's preoccupation with love and death.

Wiesenfeld devoted several years chiefly to Geotic material, culminating in the project's first official album, Abysma, issued by Ghostly in March 2017. He resumed activity as Baths later that year, first contributing the theme song for the video game Dream Daddy: A Dad Dating Simulator in July, then releasing the full-length Romaplasm in November, an album informed by the escapism and romance of comics, anime, and games. After Geotic's second album Traversa appeared in October 2018, further Baths work included remixes for WHY?, Tomas Barfod, Let's Eat Grandma, and Imogen Heap. In May 2020 he issued Pop Music/False B-Sides II on his own Basement's Basement label, a group of tracks recorded between Obsidian and Romaplasm that carried newly written lyrics, alongside a remastered reissue of the original Pop Music/False B-Sides.