Interview by Greg Poblete — September 2024

The New Zealand producer, Jock Nowell-Usticke, known by his artist name BAYNK, finds himself in a time of reinvention, reinvigorated by his travels and life experiences over the past few years, igniting inspiration for his new album, SENESCENCE. Releasing September 27th, 2024, the album channels a carefree and uplifting spirit that is needed more than ever through eccentric production and Jock’s most poignant songwriting to date.

Along with the album, BAYNK has created a new stage setup to elevate, both literally and figuratively, the music from SENESCENCE. The construction resembles a giant, inflatable pillow with a stage floating on top where Jock and his band perform. With colorful, pulsating lights inside, the architecture of the pillow is a design of both ingenuity and precarious wonder.

About a week before his performance at The Wiltern, we were able to chat with Jock via Zoom as he sits in a rather bare, undecorated house in Los Angeles where he’s been staying. We talk about the inspiration for the new stage design, clever production techniques on the record, and the reason why there are no features on SENESCENCE.

Greg: Congrats on the new album, it’s fantastic. How are you and where are you currently in the world?

Jock: I am in Los Angeles. We moved into this house for a little bit, there’s nothing here. It’s just a white, bare room. But it’s been feeling good. It’s been a crazy week of insane weather, traveling up and down from San Francisco to play this first show, so I’m taking a little breather before we get into these next shows. Where are you calling from?

Greg: I’m also in SoCal so I’ve definitely been experiencing the weather too.

Jock: It’s been insane. I’m not used to this weather where I’m from.

Greg: What’s the weather right now where you’re from?

Jock: I’m converting for your temperatures here… we see like a maximum of 86 which is nice. So this has been crazy. It’s been nice today.

Greg: It’s always nice having a conversation starting out with the weather.

Jock: Just smooth into it. Classic first-time meeting conversation.

Greg: Speaking of San Francisco, you just had a show out there. How was it finally being able to perform on the “pillow” in front of an audience and can you explain how that idea came to be?

Jock: The “pillow” was originally inspired by this guy named Geraldo (Zamproni) who makes these beautiful, inflated rigs with pillows underneath. They look like pillows but he inflates them underneath large structures, mainly concrete bridges and overpasses, and it looks so surreal. Myself and my creative director, Spencer Graves, had seen that and became inspired to do a version of it where it’s not a bridge. It’s a floating piece of concrete attached to nothing and have that be a stage, and try to get a precarious-looking object balanced on top of something soft.

As soon as he pitched it to me, I was sold immediately. It sounded like a cool thing to look at. I had to build it. It’s a little terrifying to perform on top of it but it’s well worth it. It’s opaque. There are lights inside, so you can see it breathe and swell, and do all this stuff.

Greg: From what I’ve seen, it seems very high-tech and inspiring. What was the most challenging part about putting it together?

Jock: The most challenging part was probably the initial engineering phase because obviously it’s not… how much of the illusion do I want to sell here?

Greg: You don’t have to give up too much information.

Jock: The engineering, honestly, because we didn’t hire any fluent engineers or people to try and figure it out. I went to university for engineering, so myself and my manager drew it up in Blender and some other software that aren’t supposed to model real-life situations to get it to blow up in a natural fashion and actually look like a pillow. Inflatable pillows usually don’t look like normal pillows. They bulge around the edges and they don’t have nice seams. So selling the illusion that it’s a regular pillow and not some inflatable camping pillow that looks semi-ugly; that was the toughest part. And building it was a pain. But it’s worth every drop of sweat that we put into it.

Greg: It sounds like both worlds of your past engineering experience and music came together for this one project.

Jock: For sure. It definitely helped a little bit in the understanding how it might blow up and that sort of stuff. But yeah, I don’t remember anything from university so I was purely going off vibes.

Greg: I’m sure there’s still some nuggets still rattling around in your brain.

Jock: There’s something deep recess caverns.

Greg: How do you feel like performing on this new stage adds to the overall story of the new album?

Jock: I think it reflects much better the way I was feeling about the music when I wrote it which was slightly precarious and like I was running out of time. Things were a bit off balance. Only in hindsight can I really see that’s why this stage felt so good. Aside from that, it feels like a better way to present. You’re up much higher, everyone can see as opposed to only a couple people in the front row. Not much more than that, honestly. I do feel like the physicality of the pillow matches, at least in my head, really well with what the music is about.

Greg: Going into the new album and speaking about your headspace when working on the new record. Aside from music, what were some influences that helped shape the sound of this record?

Jock: General life experiences, travel, other cultures, being away from home, a little bit of loneliness. I spent the last year and a half on the road, not necessarily touring but jumping from city to city. And I feel like there’s a piece of those cities in each of the tracks that they came from. Different tracks are from different cities and I feel like that’s reflected in the songs. And being in those situations inspires different types of music and helped me get more tracks out.

Often if I’m caught up in the same space, living in the same space with the same situation around me, I can get myself in a rut. Changing things up and having novel experiences in my life has really driven better and more unique music, and makes it easier to create.

Greg: So your physical environment influenced you a lot with this new album?

Jock: For sure.

Greg: From the sonic elements of the album, it sounds very carefree with bright, infectious grooves and catchy melodies. Were there any production techniques that you experimented with on this new album or was there any gear that you were excited about using?

Jock: Yeah, I tried to get a bit more out of the box than usual. I usually work a lot in Ableton, but this time I was set on trying to make it a little more interesting and set it up so it would be easier for a band to play it.

I loved this one keyboard called a Crumar Seven. It’s a recreation of a Rhodes and Wurli, and all those electric pianos but it’s basically a synthesizer/sampler. It sounds incredible. I had a bunch of guitar pedals that I used a lot: stuff from this company, Hologram. They have a pedal called Microcosm and another called Chroma Console that were really good for creating beds of sounds and ambiance that the initial track can sit on.

I used quite a few hardware autotune machines as well and would sing into them through guitar pedals. There’s a few pedals by Roland, an E4 Voice Tweaker and a V4. Another really big one was this iPad app called Samplr which is just a sampler you can play with your fingers. You can play it like a bow, like a violinist would string a bow. It sounds very strange but it creates very natural sounding samples that wouldn’t sound like you’re playing it on a beat pad. That was a favorite for sure.

Greg: Something I noticed about the album is that you use your voice as an instrument driving a lot of the main melodies through effects or pitch shifting. How meticulous was that process of trying to craft a perfect vocal sound and have it match up with the overall vibe of a particular song?

Jock: It’s not meticulous. It’s like throwing stuff at a wall and seeing what sticks. I don’t do very well with tweaking or have a conscious thought of where things should be placed. I’ll be considerate in the mixing phase and arrangement, but I don’t have the attention span to do that. So if something’s not working, it gets deleted and we try a new approach, or record more vocals.

Greg: So you stick to the first idea that you’re working at?

Jock: Yeah, I get very attached. If something has stopped working, the song just gets deleted. It’s honestly not the way to go. I have some collaborators who managed to pull me through on a few tracks that I thought were dead. I need it to spill out very fast. Otherwise, I feel like the song hasn’t got there and I can’t add to it because the feeling I got from the initial demo or in the first hour or two dissipates too quickly.

Greg: Everyone has their creative process, so I respect that. With this new album, I feel like there’s a heavier focus on the lyrical aspect. What would you say is the most difficult part about translating your story into words rather than focusing on the instrumentation?

Jock: For me, I guess the time that it takes to get all these stories out. I don’t necessarily feel like there’s any difficulty in telling my story. I don’t get embarrassed about it or feel like I shouldn’t tell certain parts of my story. It’s that the things I want to say in my songs need the right context. They need the right production. I need to make the production before the lyrics come out. I don’t work like a normal songwriter… actually I don’t know what a normal songwriter does. I know a few people who write before they start making the music but for me, the music dictates where the lyrics go.

Greg: The instrumentation inspires that feeling.

Jock: Yeah, I came from being a beatmaker more than I was a songwriter. I often find that I write about the same thing because I make a lot of dance music. So I think I was trying to make the music a little bit weirder so I would sing about different things. But that happens too because eventually I start singing about the same thing, and then I start making different music because I’m getting sick of writing dance, love songs.

Greg: Another thing I also noticed about the new album is that there’s no features. Was this an intentional move or do you believe SENESCENCE was meant to be a statement about being able to make incredibly catchy tunes without the need of any features?

Jock: It wasn’t intended to be a statement. It ended up that way. It’s easier to be yourself… I don’t know if that’s true. It feels more intimate and more direct if I’m the only person speaking on it. At a certain point, there were so many tracks that didn’t have features on them, I thought it would be strange to go asking or looking for one or two. And because I was traveling so much, as I mentioned before, I didn’t get in the room with any people. I’m not a big one for a Zoom session or writing over the internet unless I know the person already or it’s a dream feature, a dream collaboration.

So it was not planned but I’m glad it came out like this. I like doing a project that’s just me. But I don’t feel any type of way about not having features and I’ll continue to do them in the future.

Greg: One song in particular that I really like on the album is “Mr. Jocko.” It’s such a fun, colorful tune. Can you talk about how that track came to be and what, in your mind, does it take to be a good supervisor?

Jock: (Laughs) Supervisor? I asked my friend, Annabelle, who runs a school in Zambia because the sample is actually the school children who go to the school. My mom’s Zimbabwean. She lives in the country next door.

And a supervisor? I think it means “boss man.” Or maybe a producer, or arranger. What makes a good supervisor? I guess someone who knows how to put things together. Someone who can mix the right colors to make a beautiful shade or curate a collection that seems to work together.

Greg: So you would consider yourself your own supervisor?

Jock: Of course. I’m the executive producer.

Greg: While you’re looking up definitions, obviously the definition of “senescence” is the process of growing old or deteriorating with age. As you continue to grow as an artist, do you feel like you are continuously striving to outdo yourself with every release or do you let every project be what it needs to be when you release it?

Jock: That’s deep. I feel like trying to beat your last releases can be unhealthy and get you in a disarray. It doesn’t necessarily have to be better, it just has to be different in my eyes. As long as you’re trying something. I mean, I guess it does have to be better. I am always trying to be better than my last songs. It is kind of a competition against myself. Sorry, I kinda phased out on that question…

Supervisor means teacher or guardian. What makes a good teacher or guardian? I don’t know. I’m not either of those. When I get there, I’ll let you know.

Greg: As you have more opportunities to finally perform these songs live, do you feel like they are going to generate new meaning when you play them in front of an audience?

Jock: Definitely. I feel like the majority of the time I only figure out what the songs are about a few months after the release. And it can be when I’m by myself, through shows. I feel like a lot of the writing, I don’t write things down. It’s very subconscious. Quite often I don’t even know what memory I’m referencing in my head once I’ve written something.

Greg: Do you think once something is released, the audience makes a new meaning for it and sometimes it changes your idea of the song too?

Jock: Sometimes I don’t like to say what my meaning is about because oftentimes when I’ve heard artists talk about their music and explain the meaning, it’s totally different to what I had come up with. Other times it’s really interesting and poignant. It honestly doesn’t matter. I think it’s beautiful that we can come up with new meanings for songs that someone else wrote.

Greg: What do you hope fans take away from listening to this album? Is there something specific that you do want them to know?

Jock: I want them to get the same release that I had when writing it, which was that “time is precious,” “live in the now,” “be present,” “you’re not invincible.” That’s definitely what I was thinking. I thought I was invincible when I was 26 or 27. Life is finite and it should be enjoyed, so enjoy it. That’s it basically. They can take whatever they want.

Greg: That ties into the album title too, SENESCENCE. We’re all aging, we’re not getting any younger, so we might as well enjoy the now while we can.

Jock: Exactly.

Greg: Do you think there is going to be a sort of trilogy with another project titled “ESCENCE?”

Jock: If I can find another word that rhymes conveniently then maybe there will be, but I haven’t found it yet. So it might be over, who knows?

Greg: If it’s one thing, whether a mindset or a sonic idea, what do you believe encapsulates BAYNK as an artist in this particular moment of your career and what is something you hope to accomplish sometime in the future?

Jock: Maybe it’s joy because that feels so important having that. Not all the time, but as reference for when you’re not in the best place or when you’re content: at a medium knowing that those moments will happen for the rest of your life. And that’s what I look forward to and keep working towards.

I won’t get those special moments without the work and the labor of making music to fit those moments. Touring becomes very hard and it’s so much work, but all you need is just one person to tell you “The show was sick” and it’s all good. Just one song to hit really hard during the show.

Check out BAYNK’s website for upcoming tour dates and news, and make sure to listen to BAYNK’s new album, SENESCENCE, available on all streaming platforms.

Interview: BAYNK Reveals Inspiration for “Pillow” Stage Design and Vibrant, New Album SENESCENCE

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