I totally thought I was over Baths (the Los Angeles electronic artist, Will Wiesenfeld, born April 16, 1989; not the process of immersing and washing one’s body in a large container of water—that, I love). I was pretty obsessed with his 2013 album, Obsidian, but as time wore on, the songs started to rub me the wrong way for some weird reason. Maybe I was too obsessed with the album; like that summer in middle school that I had to make lunch for my brother and myself and relied solely on Chef Boyardee because who doesn’t love canned beef ravioli every day for three months, right‽ Turns out maybe you can have too much of a good thing. Regardless, I went into Baths’ new album, Romaplasm, with a pretty skeptical point of view, ready to not like it right off the bat. Dude showed me. Even if Wiesenfeld’s voice isn’t 100% your thing, his musical intuition is fucking phenomenal—it was tough for me to narrow the tracks I liked down to just one to feature on this month’s mixtape and I’m excited to give the whole album repeated listens. You win this round, Wiesenfeld. You win this round.
This month’s mix (our last before next month’s year-ending best of) kicks off with a track from another local artist though—Echo Park’s Line and Circle, who gently ease us into the mix with their rolling, driving track “Man Uncouth”. Chilean band Breaking Forms follows that with their sparkling “Carnival” before we hit “Out” by the aforementioned Baths’, a song that anxiously celebrates going out and coming out with gloriously glitchy melodies and rhythms.
This mix also features some wonderful melancholic dance tracks (kinda the best kind of dance tracks) from Melbourne duo Kllo (who we first featured last August), Canadian band Young Galaxy, and Australia’s Airling (AKA Hannah Shepherd). PS—we just did the math, and almost every mixtape this year features one to two Australian artists. What is going on down there?
We’ve got a new one from deadpan new wave Norwegians Klanstof, a veerrryy chill track from NYC’s Folie, and even more chillness from Bogota’s excellent Ela Minus; some buoyant pop from Portland, Oregon’s Jessica Boudreaux of Summer Cannibals and Nashville’s Jessie Early; a song that’s equally soulful and hopeful—”Start Again”, by London’s Roseau and the less hopeful but equally soulful “Good Plan, Sweetheart” from enigmatic flower-faced Cincinnatian Nova Moura.
Finally, we’re ending things off with two pretty epic songs—the droning, rhythmically driving “The One to Wait” by Northwestern musical collaborative CCFX and the hauntingly beautiful “Black Fly” by Circuit Des Yeux, AKA Chicago-based musician Haley Fohr, who plays Resident in Los Angeles’ Arts District in January. My guess is that her live show is equally epic.
That’s it—hope everyone enjoys and, as always, support the art and artists you love by following, buying, and loving them back.
