It’s one thing to write music from the stomach versus the heart, as was Will Wiesenfeld’s intention for Gut, his first Baths album in seven years. It’s not a guarantee the songs will actually hit like that. In Gut’s case, though, there’s really barely any separation between the philosophical and the guttural, the feeling and its translation, eschewing the fear of being lost in both. Since releasing his first album under the moniker, Cerulian, in 2010, Wiesenfeld’s work has always been characterized by an unshakeable and downright mimetic physicality, boundless in its erosion of boundaries between real and fantastical worlds. But the self-released Gut – which features live drums on more than half its tracks – is newly unfiltered and unruly in a way that carves a path forward for the project. The intricate nature of his music is still there, but its elasticity serves to stretch the feeling until it gnaws and bubbles through the body. Gut strikes, excites, and soothes in almost equal measure; it’s stomach music, to be sure, but it can’t help but speak to the heart.
We caught up with Baths to talk about noise rock, underwear parties, exercise, ex-Christianity, and other inspirations behind his new album, which is out now.
Rigid noise rock
I understand this is more of a formal or philosophical influence than a strictly musical one. You namecheck groups like Gilla Band and Protomartyr in press materials.
Exactly. I think it’s about the execution of a musical endeavor. I’m very inspired, constantly but especially with this record, by the idea of intellectually or deliberately delivered chaos. The thrill of something like punk rock or metal or noise music is often about cathartic release, where there’s just as much as you can put into it. It’s a wide breadth of sound and experience, this thing that’s understood as entirely unfiltered. What I’m talking about is this almost a futile effort, but not really – it’s a means of trying to cage that feeling, to still have some degree of ownership or building a contraption around it. To parcel it into pieces to make it more digestible or understandable, or to say more things with that chaos. I talk about Gilla Band all the time because their newest record hits that for me in a weirdly specific, brain-itching way. It’s my favorite thing, at least in the past few years in music – that kind of chaos and explosive intensity, but notched off. You’ll have sections that are the loudest thing you’ve ever heard, cut to something completely dry or different, or shaped differently even if it’s still intense, and then move through the next thing.
If that same Gilla Band record was at a constant flip with infinitely less dynamics, it wouldn’t be as interesting to me. It would be cool, and I’d enjoy it as a record, but the thrill of so much of what they do is the tempered nature of it: the holding back is half the intensity. That’s my thesis statement on it. That’s the obsession, like all this influence and inspiration I’m going to talk about – I don’t know how directly that translates to my record, maybe not at all. But it’s something in my brain that I think about. Some measure of it probably leads into what I did on my record, but nowhere near the same. It probably doesn’t even sound the same.
Whether consciously or not, did you find yourself making space for that controlled chaos? I hear the sturdiness of rock instrumentation in the record, but the chaos is often more lyrical.
I think there are a lot of moments on my record that are heightened emotion, but most of those moments I don’t want to let ring out. It’s almost a reflection of how anger exists for me in my own life. If I feel angry, I don’t let anger happen to me – just as an adult and a courteous person existing in the world, I try not to let anger be the way I move through things. But when I’m angry, what happens is I recognize the anger and immediately tell myself that if I need to experience it, I don’t need to force that on other people. I need to go somewhere or go away for a bit. That often happens if I’m in a really intense argument with someone, I’ll say, “Hey, I can feel how angry I am right now. I want to take ten minutes.” This is a very rare occurrence because I’m not an angry person, but when I experience it, it’s like, “I need to not be angry at you for no reason. Let me be angry for a little bit, and I’ll come back.”
The way I execute a lot of those more intense emotions, especially anger on this record, is almost that same idea of having to pull back and keep it tempered, and maybe explode in a moment, but then the next moment isn’t still there. I go back to some semblance of normalcy or pull away entirely and try to do something else. To have anger written into the album at a full clip the entire time is not only disingenuous to how I experience anger, but it’s almost emotionally irrelevant. That doesn’t get you any closer to how I feel or think. The only time I’m wildly, openly emotional and unbridled in that way, and I let it ride out, is maybe in the very last song. And that’s not even anger anymore – it’s more like a brutal acceptance. It’s the sound of having to deal with it, of how upset it made me, but I’m just like, “Okay, fine.” I feel like the way the record ends isn’t necessarily on a positive or negative note, it’s just acceptance. Which is still a tough thing for me.
There’s also the opener, where there’s this burst of an intense vocal, but then it’s quickly bottled back up.
Yeah, where it builds to me saying, “Could you find the patience?” But the first part of “patience” I get really angry on. It’s like, obviously, I’m not patient anymore. I’m very impatient.
Gym
Exercise has been a part of my life for more than 10 years now, probably closer to 12 or 13, in a very serious way. If not every day, I’d go three or four days a week; now I’m on a program where it’s every day, but it’s less intense, and that works really well for me. What I’m talking about here is how the idea of a gym has skewed my listening. Most of my listening used to be in my car, and I’d listen to music in my car all the time. When I wasn’t a regular gym person, I’d have music on at home. I think, as a person, I was way more into ambient or experimental electronic stuff that comfortably fills the room and creates an atmosphere. I’m still obsessed with atmosphere, but the tone of the music was much more subdued and reflective. But going to the gym more regularly, and also using my car less – now to the point this year where I’ve actually sold my car and only bike everywhere, which is crazy for LA, but it’s my truth now – most of my listening happens at the gym. The thing to keep in mind is that they already play music at the gym, so me listening to music means it has to be something that exists on top of that or louder than that most of the time.
Simply because of that fact, I’ve sought out music that’s more energetic, loud, or intense. Finding the beauty and excitement in the stuff I already love, but also in all sorts of other music in those spaces. The thing that really factored into my record was music like that – louder music that’s also really relentless. That’s my favorite word to talk about. I’d listen to, again, Gilla Band or Protomartyr or a lot of hardcore techno and noise. I also got really into Container – I’ve always been into Emptyset, if we’re talking more on the electronic side. Music that isn’t afraid to let an idea pound itself into your brain; ideas going so hard that it’s very difficult to forget them or the feeling of experiencing that. In the way I write music, I have trouble submitting to that. I have a lot of fidgetiness trying to let an idea ride out forever, so I tried to allow that a bit more – especially in that opener, where it switches to the second half of the song and just goes. There are still changes, but I just wanted the feeling to go as far as I could take it.
Looking at it a different way, do you feel like there’s an element of athleticism in your music, that factors into your process or life as a musician?
One of the things I think about a lot is what it takes to tour and your endurance as an artist for something like that. It’s a common conception that touring is really difficult, especially because you’re doing it for long stretches. The more I made a point in my life to keep up stable exercise habits, coupled with – I don’t drink, I eat fairly well, I sleep really well on tour – because of that, I’m really good on tour. The last two tours I had, I finished them thinking, “Hey, I could probably still do this for two more weeks.” One was six or seven months ago, and the other was a year before that. I finished both truly feeling like I could do double the amount of touring I just did and still be totally fine. I came home to LA and felt no different, I felt fine. That hasn’t been the case in the past; often I’d finish a tour feeling completely deflated. So this idea of longevity and fitness as it relates to health and the execution of your musical practice in a performance space – that’s something I think about.
It’s that idea of endurance, and that relating to physicality and sound and aesthetic – all these things tied into what I wanted Gut to feel like and sound like. Especially because it’s supposed to be stomach music, which is already such a physical incentive. There’s no separating my physical self, sex, and all these other things from what I was trying to make this record be.
Ursula Le Guin: “like an arrow, like thought”
I saw that this quote is from A Wizard of Earthsea.
That’s part of a cycle of books, I think five or six total, which I’ve read all of at this point. Firstly, I’ll just say that when I started the Earthsea cycle, it hit me very quickly that this was the author I’d been looking for my entire life. I’d never read prose that felt like that to me – it’s fantasy, but she’s also done a ton of sci-fi, and there’s so much of her work I’ve yet to dive into. But it hit me like: This is the author I’m going to take my time with and absorb more and more of her work over the course of my life. That’s already how her work feels to me.
This quote is from Earthsea, and it’s kind of from an innocuous moment. It’s just: “Quick as he had once done at Roke, Ged took the shape of a great hawk: not the sparrowhawk they called him but the Pilgrim Falcon that flies like an arrow, like thought.” The first time I heard it, and almost every time I hear it, it gives me goosebumps. I get very activated by it. It’s not a profound saying; it doesn’t have major weight to it. But it hit me in a really lyrical way that’s hard to explain, but I’ll do my best. The idea of great lyrics to me – and probably great writing and poetry, but lyrics is where I live when it comes to writing – is the ability to distill a feeling, an intensity, or an expression into the smallest possible strike so that it rings as true as it can without inflating it. With these words, there are already a million ways to describe an arrow, and then reducing that further to describe a falcon that flies like an arrow, which is what this thing is doing, “like thought” is such a crazy weight of a descriptor because it makes me think of so many things; so much connotation and intensity.
I’m trying to make it make more sense and sound less corny, but the idea of trying to describe the flight of a bird in the simplest terms possible – first, to call it an arrow, and then to describe that arrow as flying like thought – is such a beautifully precise descriptor. It sounds like intent, actualization, humanity, intellect, and all these things. It makes me visualize the idea of a falcon flying as the most straight and true thing that could possibly exist. It’s such a crazy amount of things that come from just saying “like thought.” So, I became utterly obsessed with it, for no reason other than I get hyper-fixated on things all the time. My brain is like, “Oh, that’s the best thing ever,” and now I’m going to think about it for nine months or whatever. It’s not that serious, probably to other folks, especially people who are, like, English majors. I don’t come from that territory. I only know what makes me excited, and I just think it was one of those things that reconfirmed for me that it’s possible to say the greatest thing you’ve ever heard in the least amount of words possible.
It made me really inspired to keep writing lyrics and to keep putting things together, imagining ways that words can make the world make more sense. It’s just the dream of writing coming alive for me in a really dumb, silly, small way. I just think it’s utterly perfect. Every time I hear it, I’m like, “I wish I could ever in my life write something that hit me the way that hits other people.”
I initially typed out “like a thought” to find the source, before realizing it’s “like thought,” which makes a big difference.
Right, there’s a major distinction. The idea of thought being zero disconnect from something, and then using that to describe the flight of an animal, is so strong.
You also have to be a really good writer to take such an abstract word and use it in such an exacting way.
That’s why I’ve become so obsessed with her. Every now and then some small thing she’ll say hits so perfectly. It’s not even grand gestures of storytelling, which I think she’s also great at, and I thoroughly enjoy her stories; but it’s just the way she talks about something that’s so exactly right for what my brain wants to hear or understand about the world. It’s medicine to me.
Do you spend a long time hyper-fixating on your own lyrics in a similar way?
That definitely happens, and it happens with titles, too. I have a working notes document where anytime I hit a title that feels inspiring to me, I’ll write it in there. Some of them just stick with me forever. It’s like, “I know this will be a title, I just don’t know what the song is yet.” It’ll just sit in my phone forever. One of them that I never made into a song but think about all the time is ‘Sinewy Brooklyn Bicep’, which is a very specific, gay-brained thing that I could say, and I feel like any gay person on earth – any American, especially – would be like, “I know what that is.” But to me, it was a very distinct thing that I thought was really funny but also horny in a very specific way. So I fixated on that for a long time, but nothing ever came of it.
And that happens a lot. I’ll fixate on lyrics, an idea I want to make a song into, or a sound or aesthetic I want to try to achieve. ‘No Past Lives’, that song from my record Obsidian in 2013, the entire aesthetic sound of that song was a hyper-fixation. I knew exactly what I wanted to try and execute, and it was a matter of getting there. Being like, “Oh, it’s not right yet; oh, it’s getting closer; ah, here we are.” So, it’s helpful in some ways, but in other ways, it’s the most annoying thing in the world.
Underwear parties
This definitely relates to the song ‘Chaos’, but also obviously the lead single, ‘Sea of Men’, and that lyric that’s so central to the whole record: “Carnal is the normal mode.” What’s striking to me about the album is how the spiritual often disrupts the carnal, often in the form of chaos or dissociation.
Yeah, my human brain – that’s what happens. There’s always this kind of religious undertone that battles with that stuff and makes me second-guess myself, even when I’m in full confidence. When I mention underwear parties, it’s specifically talking about this kind of party that went through the States for a number of years called the DILF party, which is literally an acronym for Dad I’d Like to Fuck. Which is very silly, but also, they were great parties with the exact kind of men I was attracted to, so I kept going. I was terrified to go my first time, which makes sense – going headfirst into the deep end of something like that is a pretty intimidating experience. But once I was in it, it was this whole other experience of life and actualization as a gay person that I’d never felt before. I started off, with the subtitle of this, by saying “intentionally aggrandizing,” which is kind of what you do. You force yourself, at least for me, almost into this idea of being larger than life. I have reservations about what I look like or what I think I look like, and mild body dysmorphia – I’ve always had trouble with how I appear to other people, and I lose confidence very quickly.
In those underwear parties, there’s nothing to hide about your body. You’re just in your underwear. Because of that, and because all these folks end up on this equal playing field of weird, all-animal nudity— – we’re all just beasts, suddenly – my brain switches, and I do this thing of almost pretending I think I’m hotter than I am, or that I’m more self-assured or confident than I am. I’ll still be shy, but in moments, I’ll walk right up to somebody I think is hot and just be like, “Hey, you look great. How’s it going?” And I feel like I’m 10 feet outside of myself – I’m watching myself do those things. It’s very not me. I’m an open and gregarious person to talk to, but I don’t have that kind of confidence in everyday life. So, it’s this weird thing of almost a practiced second self or second body. As the night moves on and it fills with more people, it’s just sweaty and meaty and gross, and really, really horny in a way that’s very specific to that kind of event. It’s a very unique thing that rewired my brain a little bit in terms of what I thought was even possible as a human being or as a gay person.
I feel like the intensity of those things still ended up going both ways: it’s a uniquely positive and actualizing experience as a gay person, but in equal measure, it can also be really lonely and isolating because you’re maybe not getting with the person you want, or you keep having this thing of, “Oh, I think that guy’s really hot. Oh, he coupled up with somebody,” or, “I think this person is this way,” and then they’re 10 dicks deep on the dance floor. You’re like, “Well, I see they’re different than the way I thought I saw them,” which is fine. I’m a total slut myself, so I have no shame about any of that. But it’s more just this tug-of-war with your fantasies about what you think you want and what’s actually happening, and who you are in the mess of all of that. It’s just so out of this world – messy and positive and negative. It’s such an overwhelming thing that I can’t help but be inspired by the wildness of it.
I’m a person who still loves bathhouses and public bathing, especially gay bathhouses. I could talk about those for an entire interview – we don’t have time for that – but it’s a stem of that. Talking about these underwear parties is almost the more outward-facing thing of that. Bathhouses are the more intimate version, the more behind-closed-doors type of thing, whereas these underwear parties are explosive. There’s no way to not be inspired by it and to pull some of that into inspiration for this record.
Is that tug-of-war hard for you to capture in a body of work as a whole, especially as you move from an experience to inspiration to expression?
I don’t think it’s expressly difficult, but I also don’t think it’s expressly easy. The way I do it is I let singular emotions have their moment. The euphoria of that sort of experience – that’s ‘Eden’. That’s what that song is, where I’m allowing the sexuality and the heightened sense of self and all of that to run at full throttle. That song is literally about having sex with an angel – it’s ridiculous. That’s the effort of allowing that emotion to have as much intent as possible. But then songs like ‘Verity’ and ‘Chaos’ are much more in the doubt of that: who am I as a person if I’m living this way and going this hard on these things, I’m this sexual? ‘Verity’ especially, because that one is a more difficult song. I’m all for having as many emotions as you want and making music go in any direction, but as a listener, to bring someone into the feeling you’re talking about, you have to let an emotion exist for them, however weird or obscure it is. You’ve got to let that ride sometimes. That’s my methodology: trying to give things the time they need to be felt.
Ex-Christianity
A lot of this is kind of subtext on the album, until the closing track, ‘Sound of a Blooming Flower’, where you refer to “a childhood structured by God.” How would you trace that relationship with Christianity and faith, as it affected you while you were the making the album?
I think Christianity – as a life metric, as a way to live, which is the service of a lot of religions – regardless of what I believe, it has existed as a metric for how my life was going to be. Whenever something went wrong, I would have to give it up to God. I would pray on the regular. I would marry a woman. I would do all these things that make sense for what a good Christian would be. The older you get, especially as a gay person, you gain more perspective, and for me, it started to fall apart faster and faster. I was like, there are things about this ideology that relate to me in terms of being a good person, but other parts of it are so maddeningly restrictive and indefensible to me in some ways that it’s like: What am I doing here, and why believe in something that is so flawed to everything that rings true to me about art, actualization, selfhood, personhood, gayness?
Describing it as the loss of one compass and gaining another is very much how it works for me with my relationship to religion. Christianity was a direction – I knew where I was going, what would happen to me, and how to get there. Having to abandon that meant either gaining a new religion, which didn’t, in my mind, help at all with all the different things I was going through, or creating basically a religion for myself where there isn’t religion, but just wide acceptance and understanding of everybody’s different versions of how they see the world. Using pieces of those that make the most sense to me and how I want to live a good life. There are lingering pieces of Christianity that will never escape my brain, try as I might; there are just some things that come back in a flash. But then, other times, I feel like I’ve blissfully superseded that, and I am so adult and confirmed in who I am that it seems miraculous I’ve figured out a way to live and move through my life.
Of course, everything about being a gay person is a mess and chaos, and you’re never 100% sure you’re doing the thing that makes the most sense – at least for me. My gay self and my gay brain have always been like, “What am I doing? Is any of this correct?” But at the same time, I keep seeing the rewards of staying myself. Even though it’s messy, staying true to what I think makes the most sense has continued to work for me and help flavor my art, my love life, my friendships – everything about the way I live makes more sense trusting myself in that way. And then staying open – I have to be able to trust the world as a whole in the same way I trust myself, that there are other people who will know things that I don’t, that I need to listen to and absorb. It’s all cyclical, but my point here is that the Christian things and religious things I can’t escape come up for me in the weirdest moments, when I’m almost so far along and doing well in how I see the world that it’s almost perverse. It’s impossible to escape in the way I write lyrics.
Gay illustration
This isn’t a new theme in your work, but how do you feel it fed into Gut in a way that was different? Is there a bigger chasm between the depiction of fantasy and the real world?
I think what it is is that I’m just further along on the timeline of being a person obsessed with gay illustration. There’s a difference between someone who just discovered it, someone who’s five years into it, and someone like me, who’s probably 15 to 20 years into it. It’s been a massive part of my life forever, and I can’t get enough of it. I’m still constantly saving images to my phone all the time. The difference is basically the depth – I’m this deep in that obsession, and how that relates to what I’m attracted to in the world, and how distorted that may or may not be. It’s a battle in both directions. I’m becoming more adult and mature, understanding how much of what I love about illustration is fantasy, and how to compartmentalize fantasy versus expectations of the real world and men I would meet or try to form relationships with. It’s another brain battle that’s happening all the time.
I don’t think I’ll ever do away with my obsession for gay illustration because I don’t want to, and it’s informed so many positive things. It’s a very healthy thing, but there are moments of unhealthiness with how deep I can get with my expectations of men, of the way I want the world to be. The projection of fantasy – it’s not unlike the way anybody else projects fantasy on looking at the most beautiful people in the world all the time. You start to get unhealthy ideas of what you’ll get out of the world or people you think you should associate with. It’s a constant level of re-engaging and undoing the wrong thoughts about it, and then learning the balance of all of that. It sounds kind of ridiculous when it’s like, “You’re having to deal with all this just looking at cartoons.” But it’s that deep with me, and it informs so much of what I feel and write about.
My imagination is disgustingly big – I mean that with my full chest. It sounds silly to boast about, but if there are characters I’m obsessed with, I build entire vast fictions in my head of how they are a gay person, the things they do, and the way they move through the world. It helps me articulate my own thoughts and things I want to have myself do and accomplish and see in the world. It’s the way anybody projects their own life onto a character in a TV show or whatever else in live action. For whatever reason, the thoroughfare for me is easier with illustrated or animated characters, and so I go really ham on that.
It makes me think of the line, “The dream isn’t wild, it isn’t new,” from ‘Cedar Stairwell’.
It’s cool that you pointed out that line because I feel like ‘Cedar Stairwell’ is maybe the riskiest song for me in terms of misinterpretation. If people don’t put enough focus or weight on that lyric, the whole song comes across wrong. The idea with that song – not to tell you how you should interpret a song – is that the dream isn’t wild, it isn’t new, and then the song describes a fantasy. I think some people, if they’re not paying attention well enough or sort of breeze by the first line, read that as a reality for me. The whole point is that it’s not, and that’s the only way that song makes sense.
The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin
It’s a trilogy, technically: The Three-Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and then Death’s End. It’s probably the best science fiction I’ve ever read in my life. My brother forced me to start diving into it, and I couldn’t believe how far it goes. It just goes further and further than anything you can expect. The first time I felt that way about a piece of science fiction was the first time I played the first Mass Effect game, which is a very isolated experience, but I was obsessed with the story in that game. This story is untouchable. I’ve never read anything like it in my life, probably never will again. One of the most central things of it is – I don’t want to say nihilism, because I’m not in my depth about that; I’m not researched on it – but if you talk about it in a profound way, the idea that nothing matters, and what that actually means about how you live your own life: it can be spun as a positive.
I think so much of that story and the way I felt about it is ultimately very terrifying and bigger than you could ever imagine, but in a way where it makes the way you live your life so much more about yourself and your surroundings, keeping to what keeps you happy in your own world, as opposed to trying to think about the weight of your relation to the universe as having meaning, which is completely irrelevant. I don’t really know how to go into it well enough because these books are way smarter than I will ever be. But it just made me terrified at first, but then kind of feeling positive by the end of it, about how, even if I live my life wrong or backwards, or I don’t do what I set out to do, I think it will still end up being good because, in equal measure, none of anybody’s lives matter. It’s spooky at first, but when you come to the balance of that, it’s kind of like, “Well, we’re gonna do what we’re gonna do.”
Video games: Returnal and Monster Hunter
I’m a big gaming person, and I mentioned those because they were full-fledged life lessons for me – not just, “Hey, you gotta check out these games; they’re really fun.” Returnal is an extremely difficult game. It’s this genre called roguelikes or roguelites, and it basically taught me to play games like that and taught me perseverance and what it takes to master something. I haven’t been in school for over a decade – learning new things is a really arduous process, and this game forces you to take a step back, be patient, and learn the way it needs you to play it. It was a massively rewarding experience. It’s one of my favorite games of all time at this point.
Monster Hunter, on the other side of that, is a more communal and fun and shared experience than any game I’ve ever played. It’s the most fun I’ve ever had gaming. You do it with three other people, where the four of you work together to take down a monster. As opposed to battling against your friends, where it gets kind of heated and you feel angry, it’s four of you working towards a computer objective. It ends up being ultimately far more fun for me because you’re just kind of like, “Oh, damn, we didn’t get it. Let’s go again – let’s get right back up on the horse and try one more time.” I love them both dearly, and I think all those things were happening to me during the recording process of this record.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
Baths’ Gut is out now via Basement’s Basement.
