In a prismatic world filled with gossamer strands of light, chrome-plated angels, liquid dragons, shattered glass and twisted metal — all floating in an electrically charged miasma — you will find the sonic home of Margate-based artist and producer, BABii.
A member of creative collective Gloo alongside close collaborators and friends, Iglooghost and Kai Whiston, BABii has been steadily making a name for herself over the past few years with her unique brand electronic pop. Straddling the line between the ethereal fairy pop of early Grimes and the hard crashing maximalism of producers like Rustie or Hudson Mohawke, BABii music manages to inhabit an almost impossible niche of being simultaneously some of the most soft and delicate music you've ever heard and also some of the most brutally hard.
Backed up with the same level of creative world-building we've come to expect from the Gloo crew, BABii's musical output is matched by an equally rich visual universe that ends far beyond her stylized 'ii' aesthetic and spills into anything from music videos, companion books and alternative reality games to custom-designed buzzsaw and a live A/V shows that take place out the back of a van.
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Raised by her father for most of her life in Canada and England, BABii's latest album, MiiRROR, explores the emotional aftermath of having recently reconnected with her mother. Plumbing the depths of the artist's own emotions, the record explores her relationship to maternal figures, abandonment, the shattering of own previously held notions and reconciling childhood memory with sobered reality.
From trying to parse between past trauma and present motivations on "BRUiiSE" to confronting her demons on album highlight "SHADOW," BABii wrestles with this conflicting mixture of emotions that have managed to finely intertwine themselves. As the record's title suggests, MiiRROR reflects on all of these contradictory sentiments, placing the soft up against the hard, the vulnerable right beside the guarded, cautious optimism alongside jaded cynicism. What we end up with is a startlingly intimate body of work that exposes an incredibly personal side of the artist's life but asks us to see shades of ourselves in it staring back at us.
For her PAPER Mix, BABii takes a walk on the softer side of things with a collection of droning experimental tunes, shimmering ambient interludes and ethereal incantations interwoven into the artist's own work. Featuring tracks from Floating Points, Grouper, Eartheater, CFCF, Rustie and more, BABii gives us a perfect mix for some thoughtful reflection and blissed out daydreaming.
"I thought it would be cool to make a mix which explores the softer sounds that I like," BABii says of the mix. "All these songs are from the same world, even though they are from different eras and different places they all hold the same energy, 'iimaliite' angel energy. I have also included the original version of 'HUNTED' which started as a delicate pure sounding collaboration between me and Samuel Organ and transformed into an ethereal evil sounding collaboration with umru. This transformation is something I have always thought was a super serendipitous process that fit so well within the duality type themes of my album MiiRROR."
Listen to BABii's PAPER Mix and check out the tracklist, below:
Tracklist
BABii - TRACKS
DreamWeaver - Altered Reality (ft Botanical Anomaly)
Floating Points - Falaise
Sonnymoon - Nothing Thought
Grouper - Heavy Water/I'd Rather Be Sleeping
BABii - Hunted / Samuel Organ - Hunted
Eartheater - How to Fight
CFCF - Model Castings
mùm - We Have A Map Of The Piano
BABii - BRUiiSE
Waterbaby - I don't want to sing I don't want to look
Rustie - Green Language
SKY H1 - Air
BABii - Glass
Photo Courtesy of BABii
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