Artist Feature: Baileyrp
words by soleil rumpit, photos by jessica douglass, interview by allie hoffert & soleil rumpit
Baileyrp by Jessica Douglass
It just makes sense to have a Baileyrp show on the terrace on Lake Mendota, where the breeze, birdsong and rolling waves all get a chance to be featured in her music’s live renditions. Her online presence has been largely built from the videos she posted from her great Colorado backyard, recording her ultra-digital lo-fi music with lyrics written on Nintendo’s PictoChat.
Bailey Panzeca, known professionally as Baileyrp, has been releasing what some have dubbed “digicore-folk” and what she calls “beep boop calculator music” under her current name for nearly ten years. Though she’s been focused on writing new music, Bailey has recently bounced around the U.S. for different live jams and studio sessions, including On The Radar in New York City and heds’ carRADIO in Los Angeles. She plugged into the UW campus on Sept. 11 to perform at Snake on the Lake, a free yearly mini-festival co-sponsored by WUD Music and WSUM.
“I don’t think you need a 20-thousand-dollar studio to make good music that people resonate with,” she says on Instagram. “Being resourceful makes me feel inspired. If you wanna make music and you live in a forest and you have two sticks to your name, make music with those two damn sticks.”
Bailey’s set on UW’s campus still felt intimate despite the open air and the sea of tables filled with people who came to hear her. She sat on stage, Kermit-colored glasses perched on her head, with her electric guitar and unorthodox DS-pocket op-iPod setup.
Photos of Bailey’s setup from across her Social Media.
“I used to just have everything kind of separate. I have the DS and my pocket operators, but none of it is synced, so I had to press it on time which is really stressful when you’re playing live,” Bailey tells EMMIE before the show. She explains that she finally figured out a way to sync her devices up—all the backing tracks on her iPod are routed by her Teenage Engineering OP-1 into one channel, while her click tracks go through the other. Her guitar can run through the iPod and pocket operators as well, so she can add effects and stereo tracks on top of everything. “This time I’m just going to press play and go through my whole set, and I just have to switch the tracks,” Bailey says, “it’s a lot! It makes my brain hurt.”
As the sun set over Lake Mendota, she jammed a few tracks off her full-length album _Everything as well as some singles like “halo.” It’s impossible to predict exactly what her live performances will sound like, since so many of her songs have multiple versions on streaming, and even more across her social media accounts.
_Everything is not one thing — just about none of her releases are. The album itself was reworked into a different release just a month later, this version titled _Everything, re-imagined (reimagined), and an EP version followed that, with three final altered tracks. Final at this moment, that is.
“I almost always want to rework a song,” she says, “because every day I have a different feeling towards it. None of them are really a definitive version—I never say, ‘this is the one,’ I’ll just say, ‘this is the one I’m most connected to today.’”
Baileyrp by Jessica Douglass
Most artists today release alternate versions as bonus tracks, live recordings or just a remix, but Baileyrp asks: What really makes it this song? It’s usually easy to imagine a song independent of its production, through just lyrics and melody. But when Bailey radically changes the arrangement of these melodies and their sonic environment, creating some new form of the same piece, it’s hard not to wonder how far she, or other musicians, can push this idea.
Of course, it also highlights her DIY/experimental ethos, and how good she is at just having fun with music. Deconstruct it, reconstruct it, warp it into different shapes and colors; Bailey will do it all. She even made a Minecraft version of the album and invited fans to join the server it was built on.
C418’s soundtrack for Minecraft is cited as one of her musical inspirations, along with the Super Mario 64 soundtrack (specifically Dire, Dire Docks) and fellow contemporary musicians Mk.gee, the sound chalk makes and, of course, 2hollis. Lyrically, she praises Pinegrove and Phoebe Bridgers. Baileyrp also draws from the world around (and inside) her.
“I’ve incorporated my dog barking; there’s a lot of weird stuff,” she tells us. “My stomach was grumbling one day, so I recorded a voice memo and I think I used that as a bass sound.”
Bailey has a keen ear for strange sounds, both natural and manufactured. She comments on the birdsong around us, and later, with just as much charm, tells us she wants to hide a fart noise in a future track. When asked where she wants to take her music, Bailey mentions trying to write more about herself rather than the relationships she becomes enveloped in.
“I have a harder time doing that. When it’s just about me, it feels a little scarier.”
She certainly won’t be leaving the playful experimentation or video game elements that have defined her work so far.
“The next thing I drop will likely be an album, and a game with it, too,” Bailey says, teasing a concept of her signature animated black cat traveling around a digital world, battling enemies and collecting sound bites to build a song. “Nature will be a big part of it. Recordings of different locations can add so much texture; they can help a song move and breathe with the beat.”
Back on campus, Baileyrp ends her evening set by distorting the harshness of 2hollis’ “Whiplash” into a dreamily vulnerable rendition of her own, a cover that has already amassed 80 thousand Spotify streams within a month of release. After the terrace lights had dimmed, she moved to a smaller stage on University Ave and performed a karaoke encore of Justin Bieber’s “Beauty and a Beat.” For all the thought she puts into unearthing new sounds and growing her complex digital-organic world, Bailey seems perfectly happy to make music however she can, just for the love of it.
