Bathing In Blue

I'm pretty sure I've never written about any Anticon artists here on Ear To The Sound, which is both surprising and a shame because I think it's a great, forward-looking (collective-owned) label with fantastic artists including Why? and (more recently) Tobacco. Now Anticon's added 21-year-old Will Wiesenfeld to the roster and I finally get around to mentioning the label here.

Wiesenfeld is an L.A. artist who records under the name Baths and while I can only guess at his reasons for choosing the moniker, to me the name invokes the restful feeling of a languid soak and that fresh feeling once you've toweled off. If that was what Wiesenfeld was going for, then he manages to set the table for the music that he creates under the alias. Balance that with the album title Cerulean (which is a range of blues in the colour spectrum) and listeners have a couple giant clues what to expect when pressing 'play' (if one still actually presses 'play' these days).

From opener "Apologetic Shoulder Blades," on through album highlight "Maximalist" and straight to the end, Cerulean is a crisp, fresh collection of ambient IDM that blends warm piano loops and cold, glitchy drum snaps into a minor-key marvel. As with like-minded contemporaries Bibio and Daedelus there are some found-sound and spoken-word elements deftly incorporated in a way that doesn't detract from song structure ("Animals"). It's a great debut that suggests we'll be looking forward to Baths-time with an excitement my baby boy has for his own bath.

Baths just did a pretty awesome session for the folks at Dublab, which you can check out here: "Baths' Sprout Session"

Don't forget to check out Baths' spot on the Anticon website and Myspace page.

Thanks for reading, now start listening...