Bild på Baba Stiltz

Baba Stiltz

Baba Stiltz celebrates the release of his new album Totally, joined by multidisciplinary artist Isak Sundström, singer-songwriter El Perro del Mar and poet Elis Monteverde Burrau.

Over the past decade, Baba Stiltz has moved between house, American primitive guitar, production work for Yung Lean, film scores and stripped-back guitar ballads. Growing up between California and Stockholm, he learned to write songs on guitar before finding his way into Stockholm’s emerging leftfield house scene, with releases on Studio Barnhus and XL Recordings. In recent years, the guitar has taken centre stage, while everything else has been pared back to its bare essentials.

His latest solo album, Totally, arrived on October 16: a lo-fi record of everyday lyrics about loss, grief and long drives along I-5. Recorded in just five days at a studio in Helsinki, it finds Stiltz singing in a Lou Reed-esque baritone over understated arrangements. Live, he strips things back even further, drawing on Eugene Chadbourne’s free improvisation, the hypnotic repetition of Spacemen 3 and country’s plainspoken, half-spoken expression. In a world that often prioritises surface and atmosphere, Baba Stiltz makes music that is strikingly direct, at times almost confrontational.

“A glorious night of no particular significance, Totally.”