Improv Electro

"It's been more fun,” Wiesenfeld reflects, on the addition of Morgan Greenwood (of Azeda Booth) to Baths. “It's a different sort of atmosphere. The set feels more flexible and more interesting to perform, whereas by myself I felt more limited in the actual sounds that I could make and things that I could do. One of the biggest contributions that Morgan made was being adamant about having improv in our sets, improvisational electronic bits. I was really sceptical at first, but it's become the most fun parts of performing live for us, because each time we get to one of those sections it's kind of like a free-for-all and it's really exciting.

“Morgan is one of the only people that I can even fathom doing a full record with. It's taken a year of us doing stuff together [for me] to feel comfortable with the idea, [but] we've already sort of made a song together. I have a new EP coming out soon and the fourth track on it is one that we worked on together, so that will be the first thing out in the world that is of that collaboration, fully. I think for the next full-length record we're trying to actually work together. I may start a lot of the productions on my own, but he's going to be heavily involved in a way that I haven't had someone involved before, so it's going to be interesting.”

Obsidian is a much darker album than Baths' first, Cerulean. Interestingly, Wiesenfeld says while he is inspired by music, his main influence is actually visual. “It's hard to make it make sense, but the deepest inspiration for me is crazy Japanese art, and a lot of weird, rare, gay art from Japan. And animation in general. I'm constantly saving images on my phone or buying movies, or downloading things; searching through forums or Pixiv. So, at least in the past couple of years, that's been my main thing: I can't get enough of it and it always inspires me to try to write music that feels like the images I'm looking at.

“A small idea can still have a really broad sense of inspiration that you can't really explain. One of the songs on Obsidian, No Past Lives, was just a sonic idea. I wanted to have a sharp jittery piano part that falls into something very loud and kind of earthquakey and slower, and then jumps between the parts a bunch, so that it's very jarring, and the timing is different each time so it feels kind of uncomfortable. And I had that in my head before I'd made a single note of that song. Sometimes a single word will be a big inspiration and then I can write a whole song around that, so it will have small seeds, or sometimes it's a very big idea that gets smaller. For me the fun of recording is that it's always different.”