Like the kids do...

Not sure if it's a trend or not, but the young 'uns these days appear to be making the most blissful pop music going. The man behind Baths, Will Wiesenfeld is only 21 years old and while the shroud of mystery surrounding Teen Daze means he might not actually be a teen, I'm pretty certain he's part of the youth movement.

Joining the fray (though NOT, as Drowned In Sound has it; "a little too late") is 22 year old Texan Spencer Stephenson and his debut on Western Vinyl (a great label that keeps surprising me), Feeling Today. Pieced together in part by incorporating found and recycled sounds (a la Bibio on Vignetting The Compost) into a soundscape that is well worth sinking into - this isn't the Texas vista you imagine when you watch Friday Night Lights, and it's more likely to be the soundtrack to The Farm than Riggin's acreage.



Take a listen to "Waterparker" courtesy of Western Vinyl and be sure to visit Botany's Myspace page and the bookmark the WV page as well since Feeling Today is only an appetizer for a main course promised for early 2011.

I'm going to try writing shorter entries more often for the next little while so we'll see how that goes.
Thanks for reading, now start listening...

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...