New York, NY (Top40 Charts) San Francisco-based musician, producer, and conceptual artist Bill Baird has announced the upcoming release of two new albums. Baby Blue Abyss & Easy Machines will both be released on Red Essential on July 28th. Very much 'companion pieces', each album was written and recorded with a certain time of day in mind - the more acoustic and folk-influenced Easy Machines representing "morning" and the distorted eclectic rock of Baby Blue Abyss reflecting the "evening".
Baird has also released a new music video for the track "Muzak of the Spheres" from Baby Blue Abyss. The video is currently available to stream on Stereogum. Remarking on the video Baird writes, "The video was directed by my friend Elizabeth Abrams, shot by my friend Matthew Nauser and edited by Ted Feldman. I provide the costumes and the stumbling around. We shot over two days in the Dumont Dunes, this insane Bureau of Land Management site near Death Valley. The wind whips so fast through the dunes that they sing and hold notes. No, seriously. They're called singing dunes and they really do sound like singing. I tried singing out there but got a mouth full of sand."
Watch: Bill Baird - "Muzak of the Spheres"
Describing the two albums, Baird says "Even though the records sound and feel pretty different, to me they are two different expressions of the same thing. Simply, just reflecting the world as I see it, in all its absurdity, joy, sadness, complexity, profundity, and inane dull madness. The two records approach this in fundamentally different ways. Easy Machines is an 'internal' record - explores this through the inner working of my mind. Finding my place where I can be comfortable with myself. Baby Blue Abyss is an 'external' record. Searching for my place in this fucking crazy world. Sifting through the commercialism, bourgeois mediocrity, conformity in all shapes and sizes (even among the rebels), the madness of war and the inanity of office drudgery. All punctuated and subsumed by one of life's simple joys: loud rock n' roll."
The last year has now seen Baird release no less than four albums. Earth Into Aether, released in April of last year, was a freewheeling two-disc, nineteen-track work which drew comparisons to Devendra Banhart, Beck, Bright Eyes and Sufjan Stevens. Summer Is Gone was a project of epic scale released in October; an online "album" of almost infinite variation which consisted of 250 unique mixes of the ten tracks that span the record, which Baird spent countless hours to produce. These mixes were then reassembled into unique sequences every hour to create an album on which the first iteration will not repeat itself before 1.3 Billion years (give or take a couple of million).
Baird grew up in San Antonio before traveling to the Bay Area of San Francisco (via Austin, Texas) where he relocated to study experimental music at the famed Mills College, whose alumni include Laurie Anderson, Joanna Newsome, Steve Reich and Terry Riley, and where he was an award-winning scholar.
A restless polymath, Baird has also created numerous multimedia art installations, taught at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, invented a new musical instrument (the magnetetractys), hosted his own public access TV show, and collaborated on the film Origin Of Sound, shot in India over five weeks which explores his love of the Hindustani drone music of north India.
Baby Blue Abyss track listing:
1. Wino Strut
2. Graveyard Dawn
3. Everlasting Pleasure Cruise
4. Diamond Studded Casket
5. Baby Blue
6. Walking In A Straight Line
7. Muzak Of The Spheres
8. Bourgeois Blues
9. Nature Dot Com
10. Social Swamp Quicksand Screen
11. Long Ascent
Easy Machines track listing:
1. Telephones
2. Quicksilver Slip
3. Shape Shifting Game
4. Be Yourself
5. As The Sun Will Rise This Dream Recedes
6. Heaviness Of Flame
7. Sound In Your Mind
8. You're Someone Else
9. So Says Me
10. Never Go Home Again
