From Hawke's Bay to the Grammys: The Evanescent BAYNK on ADOLESCENCE & SENESCENCE
ENTERTAINMENT | INTERVIEW | HEALTH
Written by Thomas Giblin (he/him) | @thegreengiblin | Entertainment Editor
The story behind the stage name, BANYNK, is unremarkable. But it's more than a made-up word to the virtuoso who has just joined the early morning Zoom call. With flowing brunette hair, a sharp jawline and a piercing gaze, BAYNK is intimidating at first. He has an intense respect for the language of art. I use the term art here instead of music, as despite being a Grammy-nominated electronic producer, BAYNK is more akin to a multi-disciplinary artist. He's more like Carsten Nicolai or Imogen Heap than Calvin Harris or The Chainsmokers. BAYNK is the stage name of Hawke's Bay-raised, now LA-based Jock Nowell-Usticke. He came up with the word in the shower. No really.
BAYNK was on a list with 20 other possible stage names. They were all "equally rubbish." But he wanted a word that didn't exist so he could create his own meaning for it. I ask: "What meaning have you forged for BAYNK?"—a dreamt-up word and stage name that can't be found in any dictionary or thesaurus. "Oh wow, that's deep. "It's the world that I place my art in. It's whatever. It's the umbrella for everything. But does it have any meaning? It's more like a vessel."
Brady Brickner-Wood for Pitchfork remarked that his "fusion of house, R&B, and pop soon set him apart from the many similar acts scattered throughout the scene." BAYNK has evolved from posting Kygo-like music on Soundcloud to releasing meticulously crafted, sonically distinct and intricate tracks. Straddling the line between genres, his style of minimalist emotive electronica is melancholic and ethereal. Perfect for the closing minutes at a club or a late-night walk. With the release of each track, there is an accompanying visualiser or music video—they belong in MoMA or the Tate Modern. Rotoscoping, 3D animation and virtual reality are all utilised. BAYNK is an artist whose unique sonic sensibilities pair with his visual sensibilities. They exist as one.
The genesis of BAYNK's artistic rigour might stem from BAYNK's background as a Chemical Engineering major. He studied down south at the University of Canterbury. In either his second to last year or last year of study, BAYNK can't remember exactly which, he realised that his major "wasn't his thing."
Scrambling to figure out who and what he was, BAYNK wound up in a band that played covers at University gigs. "It was a lot of fun." He and the band won a competition. The prize? They got to visit a recording studio and tape a track. There was even a "hot shot recording guy" on-site who had toured with Stevie Wonder. BAYNK loved the mechanics of mixing and reproducing sound, but when he and the band got the mastered track back, "it sounded so bad." "I'm going to do it myself. I'll figure out how to do it." BAYNK opened up his laptop and set to. "It wasn't as hard as I thought it was to make music." Music is sound stacked on top of one another; it's layers upon layers. He became obsessed with melody, tempo, harmony, pitch and timbre. BAYNK's band members became irritated as "no one could play what I was making."
"That's how I got into it." His life has undergone a metamorphic change since. BAYNK has gone from the streets of Riccarton to the Grammys in downtown Los Angeles. He lost out to Harry Styles, who won the Engineered Album, Non-Classical category, but that didn't put him off making the city his new home.
"I have mixed feelings about Los Angeles, but the longer I stay here, the more I can learn to love it." What he doesn't like about the city is that it feels transitory. People move to the City of Angels to chase their dreams of becoming famous actors or musicians. If they don't make it, they return home, their ambitions shattered. But "the weather is insane", and the "level of creativity here is unmatched." "Some of the music being written here is the best in the world," and BAYNK is now collaborating with the wealth of talent available in Los Angeles.
BAYNK is again working with Spencer Graves. Graves has worked with the who's who of the music industry. Dua Lipa, Harry Styles, FKA TWIGS and Kendrick Lamar. The two worked together on BAYNK's 2020 EP, A Study In Movement, which explored the "individualistic interpretation and the relationship between music and dance". Now, with the music video for Fool For You, one of the first tracks released off his upcoming album, we see BAYNK, directed by Graves, as a single blurry figure dancing alone, exorcising his longing. For whom? We don't know. But it doesn't matter as BAYNK and his haunting auto-tuned falsetto echo over a glitching soundscape. It's spellbinding. BAYNK decries as his body contorts and limbs reach out for a love who isn't there. He sings: "You don't love me like before." BAYNK is a "Fool for this love and everything you do." A swirling black hole rotates around him. The void exists in BAYNK's and his listeners' aching hearts.
The concept of love as an emotive, destructive force is ever-present in BAYNK's discography. But he's also exploring ageing as a radically transformative existential state of being. ADOLESCENCE, his debut album, a concept album, is a musing on the immediacy of youth and romantic first experiences. After I stumbled over the word, BAYNK had to tell me how to pronounce SENESCENCE, the title of his upcoming sophomore album. It's pronounced: suh-NEH-sns. The album, an interplay with ADOLESCENCE, is named after "the process of cells dividing" and "the deterioration as they [cells] keep going and get to a point where they can't divide anymore." In short, it's the biological process of growing old.
BAYNK's experience with tinnitus was an inspiration for SENESCENCE as he started "thinking about death a lot." His tinnitus would vanish days after a festival or a show ended, but "a year and a half ago, two years ago, it just didn't go away. And it still hasn't. "I was really freaked out at the time. I thought my music career was fucked because I'm not going to be able to hear things the same anymore. There's going to be this perpetual ringing in my ear." This experience reminds us of the Sound of Metal—a movie where a heavy metal drummer's life is turned upside down as he begins to lose his hearing. "That movie scared me a lot. Because I was like, oh, thank God, I never let it get that far." Thankfully, BAYNK's tinnitus hasn't held him back. He's performing in San Francisco in a week with a 'special guest'.
That 'special guest' is a pink pillow inflatable with a giant concrete slab resting on top. This "overly ambitious" stage will feature on each leg of his "Senescence Live Experiences" tour. I've yet to decipher its meaning, but it's reminiscent of the floating barge-like stage Kanye West performed on during his Saint Pablo tour. The stage is another bold innovation from a talent who is one of the scene’s most enigmatic and exciting artists. BAYNK continues to explore the intersection of art and music. His Delphian signature is all over SENESCENCE—the most accomplished work to date from one of Aotearoa's biggest musical exports.
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