You're listening to Song Exploder where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishikesh, your way.

This episode contains explicit language.

In this episode, Will Wiesenfeld, who records under the name Baths, breaks down his song My Asma Sky.

It came out last year on his highly praised sophomore album Obsidian.

Coming up, Will talks about using the computer to intentionally destroy sounds, trying to find a balance in his music between simplicity and complexity, and how he felt getting his first drum kit.

Just like, whew. Like the best fun thing ever.

This is My Asma Sky on Song Exploder.

Tell Rock Show for you, maybe here to help me hurt myself.

Hi, I'm Will Wiesenfeld. I'm Baths. With this song with My Asma Sky, I went into it knowing I wanted to make like a simple dance track.

And in order to do that, I wanted to make a synth sound that was really, really thick and took up the space of the entire track almost, and that the song was built around that sound.

I don't have a lot of synths, and there's something in my head that was like the idea of making the most of what I have.

And so all of the synth sounds on this entire record are from a small Casio that I borrowed from my friend Luke, and the OG Microcork.

And that's it. Those are the only two synths I have. And then it's like a bunch of layers of effects and manipulation and like stitching clips together and all that sort of stuff.

So I'm getting stuff that's like further than what either of those can achieve by themselves, but it's still the root of it is just those sounds.

And it was like a very delicate thing and took a while to get it the right kind of distortion, where it doesn't sound like distortion. It just sounds thick, and that was the whole thing with it.

So this sound is the sound of the Microcork before any of the effects were laid on.

And then this sound is of the medium synth.

I knew that the timing was going to be what it was, where it's kind of syncopated, you know, so it's like three over four.

Early on in the process of this record, I got a drum set for myself, which was like the most fun thing ever.

Because I wanted to get a drum set that basically was kind of the closest I could get to an electronic drum set that was a live drum set.

So like very muted and small sounding and claustrophobic and all of that.

You can basically turn any drum set into that. It's just a matter of meeting the crap out of it and like putting stuff all over it.

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