The great bonus of the laptop age, from a composer’s perspective, is that one doesn’t have to deal with other humans in order to craft rich, dynamic music. Every melody and rhythm can be tweaked without having to worry about a guitarist with a drinking problem or a drummer with body odor. The downside is that solitude often begets self-indulgence. Will Wiesenfeld, who records as Baths, is the rare young electronic music composer with a sharp internal editor and an ear for melody, even if he needs to scale back his falsetto vocals a notch.

On his debut full length, the 21-year-old Valley boy has crafted a dozen bedroom electronic tracks rich with hummable tunes and ethereal sounds. You can hear echoes of Boards of Canada and Aphex Twin’s ambient work in “Rafting Starlit Everglades.” On “Indoorsy,” Wiesenfeld honors a “beautiful, breezy day” by pulling his curtains closed and, like any self-respecting computer geek, rejoicing in the darkness as his vocals grow increasingly foggy and distant.

Songs on “Cerulean” are, for the most part, pleasantly introspective, his way with drunken beats is inspired, and his songs are expertly arranged. The result is a sunny record perfect for driving with the windows down or moping in the solitude.

—Randall Roberts

Baths

"Cerulean"

(Anticon Records)

Three stars (Out of four)

If Prince had decided to take up esoteric mathematics instead of sex-god funk, that career might be  something Fol Chen could get behind. The Highland Park band's screwball pastiche pop sounds like an algebra problem but feels like a come-on. At Tuesday night's release party for Fol Chen's second album, "Part II: The New December" (which, admittedly, should have taken by Coheed and Cambria), the band pulled the neat trick of making its two impulses -- danceable pop immediacy and its need to run every song through a paper shredder -- feel unexpectedly simpatico.

For an act that goes by aliases, riffs on Nabokov's penchant for misdirection and refuses to show its members' faces in photos, Fol Chen really is a singles band. Members had a humdinger in the jaunty, deadpan "Cable TV" from their debut, "Part 1: John Shade, Your Fortune's Made." They have another one, "In Ruins," from this record that should be enough to carry them nationally. It starts with a junk-shop Arabesque synth riff, dragging fuzz bass and one of the creepiest pickup lines in recent rock: "You look good by siren light." But the end result has a sort of jerky, bloodless R&B; simmer that's unexpectedly entrancing. 

It's only fitting that Will Wiesenfeld, the producer/songwriter known as Baths, would invite Daedelus to share the bill at his album release party and enlist him for the first remix off of Baths' excellent "Cerulean." After all, it was Alfred Darlington who recruited him to play the Destroy L.A. party last year, the night that galvanized the 21-year-old's interest in beat music and directly led to the record's creation. 

So, on July 3, the Troubadour will host Wiesenfeld & Darlington, a tandem who may sound like an downtown law firm but who make some of the most emotionally complex electronic music around. In honor of the event, Daedelus produced "♥ (Daedelus' Snolaxed Remix"), which confirms that he knows how to wring the maximum resonance from a track and correctly use an apostrophe. Ratcheting the tempo down to a pace that vaguely resembles Houston screw music, the track becomes a twisted and disorienting waltz.

Because of the massive response engendered during Baths' May residency at the Low End Theory, the club asked the Anticon-signed artist to play a follow-up show at Wednesday night's 12th Beat Invitational, alongside heavy-hitters such as Nosaj Thing, Daedelus, and Jneiro Janel. In other related news -- and because you presumably like good free music -- the Wednesday night weekly just dropped its 15th podcast, featuring sets from Gaslamp Killer and Lorn. If you enjoy noirish, brain-bludgeoning beats and Serge Gainsbourg, you will not be disappointed.

-- Jeff Weiss

Download:

MP3: Baths - "♥ (Daedelus' Snolaxed Remix") (Left-Click)

MP3: Low End Theory Podcast XV - Gaslamp Killer & Lorn

Photo: Baths. Credit: Anticon

Chatsworth is Manson Country, the porn capital of the United States, a sleepy suburb on the fringe of Los Angeles, where people head when they want to escape but stay close enough. The land is cheap(er), horses trot across what used to be sprawling Spanish land grants, and later, the baked-brown expanse where Gene Autry and Roy Rogers played cowboy.

The serrated Santa Susana Mountains operate as a shield at the north, which creates an uneasy vacuum of ceaseless and severe winds. It’s always hotter or colder than the rest of the city, but it’s never the same, and it’s where 21-year old Will Wiesenfeld grew up.

Maybe its appropriate that a bedroom community would birth one of the city’s brightest new electronic music talents, who records his beat music under the name Baths, an appropriate moniker considered the scalding climes where he crafted his debut album, “Cerulean.” The biography exists in lieu of a real narrative (sometimes, you’re just gifted): boy asks parents to enroll him in music lessons, by 13, he’s recording his own music with a Midi keyboard. Boy hears Björk, who turns his synapses to shrapnel, causing him to teach himself the viola, the guitar and the contrabass.