Words by Lucie Wernecke

Photography by Louis F Cota and Bahar Kaygusuz

ON MENTAL HEALTH, WORKING WITH FKA TWIGS AND COVID TIMES IN NEW YORK: IN CONVERSATION WITH BAPARI

Bapari found their way into music as a DJ in downtown LA’s underground scene in the mid-2010s. They quickly became a musical force known for their heady dance tracks and cheekily disruptive pop edits. But their style and musical form of expression changed and it's worth to have a look at it. Besides hosting the monthly show Puffy on NTS Radio since 2019, Bapari has been producing music themselves for almost 10 years, working with FKA TWIGS or Kelsey Lu. Since debuting their live show at La Station in Paris at the end of 2025, Bapari’s tour highlights include opening live for Eartheater in Los Angeles, DJing the Boy Harsher release in New York, joining LSDXOXO for Floorgasm in Austin Texas, as well as headlining underground events across Australia and making several returns to Europe and Mexico.

Photography by Louis F Cota

Photography by Louis F Cota

Words by Lucie Wernecke Photography by Louis F Cota and Bahar Kaygusuz

We had the privilege of sitting down with the Los Angeles-based artist to discuss their recent show at Berlin’s Volksbühne and their new single “PRETENDER,” taken from the forthcoming EP BLURRY DAYS. Moving seamlessly from EP to collaboration and beyond, the producer continues to evolve with each release. BLURRY DAYS blends driving techno elements with lo-fi 808 hip-hop beats and atmospheric electronic textures.

How has your year been so far?

Earlier this year, I was dealing with a lot of personal things. I haven’t really talked about it, but basically I had to deal with some mental health issues and a lot of lifestyle changes. I had old habits and old thinking patterns that brought me to a pretty dark place. It was probably one of the hardest times of my life in terms of mental health, I would say. I was talking to my agent and my manager at the time and said: “I don’t know if I want to do music anymore.” I was so overwhelmed by everything that was going on, and part of me felt like I was not capable of doing these things anymore. I didn’t know who I was or what my abilities were anymore in terms of sharing myself, being out, and being in public. I had to cancel a tour last minute because I wasn’t feeling well. I hardly ever say no, but mentally I couldn’t prepare for the trip. I was trying to figure out if I could do it, also monetarily, as I had been doing music as my only job for two years and had to make a living from that. I’ve always had at least a part-time job, if not a full-time job, while I was doing music.

After a few months of getting help and making a lot of changes, I started making music again. I finished my EP that’s coming out soon. A lot of that EP has to do with my journey of starting to feel better and being honest with myself about what I was going through, about who I am as a person, and accepting myself. Part of getting better is seeing your flaws and accepting that you can’t hide from them but have to work on them. You have to recognize what the issue is and be very transparent with yourself instead of being escapist and distracted from everything that you are feeling. I feel like experiences are very fragile. I wouldn’t be where I am now if that hadn’t happened; I wouldn’t have learned the lessons I learned. But now it’s way more chill: I’ve played shows, I’ve been finishing music, my mental health is a lot better, and I’m not considering quitting music. It’s a full 180.

In the past, you've worked with artists like Lola Leon, Kidä and FKA Twigs. How has collaborating with other artists, especially female artists, changed producing for you?

Obviously, when it came to music, I started out mostly as a DJ and a club producer, and my first few EPs were mostly electronic instrumentals. In the back of my mind, I thought about collaborations with vocalists, but it wasn’t something I thought about too much. When I first started learning how to produce, I tried to make instrumentals that were interesting enough without a vocal.

As time went on, I saw the power of vocals and worked with, for example, the vocalists you listed, so I really started to appreciate how much they can add to a song. I also value working with artists who can do something that I personally cannot do. Obviously, now I sing, but that doesn’t mean I can sing the way they sing. It doesn’t mean that I can sound the way that they sound. When you can work with someone with whom you have really good synergy, you’re creating something that you wouldn’t have made alone.

It feels like a natural evolution in what I was doing as a producer, going from instrumentals to working with vocals. In the past, I would make music for myself with my vocals on it, but never release it. It was the first time on Oasis with Lola and Kidä that I was actually editing vocals that way. So that was a very big learning experience, too.
At that time, I was working at Apple Radio in New York, and part of my job was editing interviews. Learning vocal production for an interview actually taught me a lot about vocal production for singing.

How did you find your own specific aesthetic expression, and how would you describe it today?

That’s obviously developed over time. Oasis was the EP that really helped me establish a visual identity. I was working with my friend Louis, who is a photographer; we didn’t really know each other. He did all the photos for Oasis, and he really helped me come up with a visual identity for that project. It was very gloomy and moody, combined with a muted palette. A bit industrial, but outdoors, so also a bit of that organic-ness. With the name Oasis, I imagined the EP to be dystopian: a small watering hole in the middle of the desert or a smaller city in the middle of nowhere, just surviving on the minimal resources that are around you.

 

Working with Louis helped me establish my visual identity for my album art and on social media. I continued to take press pics like that afterwards; it gave me a good anchor to build on. My music has obviously changed since my first EP, but in theory, it still sounds like me. I felt like I started somewhere completely different and ended up here. I used to be a bit more industrial, a little bit more percussive. I have a bit of confidence now with beat making and doing textures and experimental things, bringing in more of the compositional elements and melodics. It’s like a slow evolution from project to project; everything I’ve learned from making my old tracks bleeds into how I still make them today. People tell me my music sounds sad, nostalgic, moody. That’s not intentional, it’s just what I like things to sound like. I’ve been hired for short projects in the past and got asked to make the music sound happier. But this to me sounded happy. This is how my ears work. Right now, I’m going in another alternative direction, playing guitars and working with a live drummer and changing genres away from IDM and electronic music. I was scared that people wouldn’t like it. Because if I don’t like it, why am I putting it out? But I wouldn’t force myself to make something that I wasn’t excited about just so that I could put out something that sounded like my old music. For me to make something good, I have to be really invested in what I’m working on and be excited by it, or else I’m not going to want to work on it.

The people will find you if you’re doing what you like. Maybe you shed some of the fans who aren’t into what you’re making anymore, but there’s a genre for everyone.

What did you learn from your third album Oasis that you included and changed in your latest EP Evermore?

Oasis made me realize I wanted more vocals in my music, so that became the biggest thing for me. It can even be from a technical side, like how loud vocals should be over an instrumental. I had been recording music with my voice since I was in my twenties, and I would make these cute demos. I knew a little bit of guitar, but that didn’t fit sonically into the music and the scene I was in at the time, so I did not publish it and just saved it in a folder on my laptop, and I also kind of had imposter syndrome. I was really focused on exploring club music and DJing, so I never really worked with vocalists. My ear is so used to hearing the beat as the loudest part of a song, but you can’t have it overpower a vocal to the point where you cannot hear the vocalist. I don’t want to say I hit a plateau in production, but you get comfortable in the way that you produce certain things. With vocals, I didn’t have techniques. So now I have this new puzzle to get inspired by and to have new ideas from. Now I am a little bit more comfortable playing around with the microphone myself and working on old demos. I wouldn’t necessarily consider myself a top singer; there’s a lot of production on my vocals. I never saw myself on stage singing in front of everyone. It took a while for me to warm up to that idea and build confidence around it. Singing in front of a lot of people was last year at La Station in Paris. I felt really privileged to be given the chance to do a full live set in front of an audience at a really cool venue without having performed before. They really did give me my first chance to do a full set. What I did before were hybrid sets: I would climb up on a speaker or the table at a party and play my own songs. I would grab a mic and sing over the tracks. Now I do sets where it’s just me and a guitar. I was not as good at guitar last year when I had the Paris show, so I was kind of faking it because I was scared to mess things up. Now

I’ve gotten comfortable with messing up and just continuing to go; the show must go on.

Tell me a bit about how you came into contact with FKA Twigs and what your experiences have been working with her.

This is actually a very funny story. I was living in New York at that time, hanging out on my phone. I saw that I had gotten a request on Instagram. I clicked on it, and it was someone saying: “Hey, I am FKA Twigs’ manager. She really likes your music and wants to work with you.” I screenshotted it, sent it to my manager, and said: “LOL, people are such scammers.” Then he texted me in less than an hour and said: “Wait, no, that’s real, I just got an email.” I was in disbelief because no one had ever hit me up to produce music. I was working at Apple at that time; I talked to the people there, and we were still able to turn in our radio show on time. She was working on Eusexua at that time, and her team had me come to LA, initially for a day. They gave me this huge studio to work in. I was so excited, kind of nervous. She walked in and said: “Hey, I love your music!” I asked her how she had heard my music. “I don’t know. I just remember hearing it, and I really thought, this is how club music should sound.” Then she was talking to someone and told me that they wanted me to try adding something to a song, which was Eusexua.

They gave me the stems, I opened my computer in this giant studio and plugged in an aux cord they gave me. I played the song, we were listening to it, and I was like: “Wait, is that Alex?”

Eartheater and I are friends from New York, and she had worked on it too; I could recognize her voice in the song, which felt like a good sign, something familiar. Then they left me in there and basically said, have fun. I worked on the song all day and added a beat, some textures, and then I showed it to them. My manager then got an email after that session from FKA Twigs’ manager asking if I would be able to stay for the rest of the week.

So I stayed for the rest of the week, and every day they moved me to a different studio. Her main producer Koreless and she stayed in one room, going through demos and working on a bunch of things all day. They would have writers and musicians come into their room and would give me a few more songs and be like, okay, add stuff to it. So every day that was just what I was doing: they would give me songs, and I would add stuff to them.

After I had made a beat or added something, I would knock on their door, go in, and they would listen to it. The feedback was very positive. By the end of it, I felt like we got along well. I just felt very, very encouraged, especially as a producer who didn’t have much experience in that setting. But being in that setting gave me a lot of confidence because I thought, if someone at this level thinks what I’m doing is good enough, I might be a good producer, you know? Maybe I don’t have the budget or access to these kinds of studios, but from a technical standpoint, from maybe an idea standpoint, clearly I can do this. I just remember being there every day and being so happy. Back then I thought, I could do this every day, I wish this was my job, I really just wanna do this.

I flew back to New York, and that was kind of the end of that saga. And then Eusexua came out, which was really cool, and I was super happy. The only song I actually worked on in that week span that ended up on the album was Eusexua. At least it was the title track, I thought, and that was already so cool. We then reconnected about a year and a half later when I was in London and playing at ICA London with Halcyon Veil. The label I released Evermore and Oasis on was doing a showcase. We were all staying at an Airbnb together; I was on Instagram and saw that Twigs was having this thing where she would sell her clothes. When I mapped it, we were down the street, so I just hit her up. I was very nervous. I got there, she and I chatted for a second, and I told her I was in Europe for a while and going to Paris the next week, and she told me that she would be in Paris the next week as well. We ended up doing a session at my friend’s apartment in Paris. I then went to London, and she was there as well, so we worked on stuff in London. Then I was in LA, and she was also there. Over the course of a few months, we just kept being in similar places, which once again just felt very aligned for me. When I was going home to LA, she hit me up and invited me to come to the studio with Yves Rothman the next day. The three of us met up, and that’s when we made Sushi.

You’ve been inspired by the expressive potential of vocals from your earliest edits of pop stars and rappers like Beyoncé, Cassie, and Vanessa Carlton. Now you’ve started to work with vocals yourself. Which influences spark inspiration in you and motivate you to start creating?

I definitely have a greater interest in female vocals in general. I don’t know why. I just think they’re really pretty, even if there are great male vocalists out there, too. On my EP, I have my friend Prophet, who lives in New York, rapping on it. That was the first time I really took the time to edit male vocals. It was very challenging for me, it was not easy. When I started making edits, I was DJing a lot and thought a lot about loops. In the underground scene in LA, I had a few friends I would make music with in my room, which brought me to start practicing doing my own vocals. I’m 32, I started music when I was 21 or 22, and I’ve been doing this for 10 years now.

 

During Covid, I moved to New York and couldn’t DJ, so I just kept putting out more and more edits, which taught me about vocals because part of the song is already there. And then, once I became a little bit more confident with production, I felt my solo stuff became a bit more developed.

Do you feel like there is a lot of pressure or expectations that you put on yourself, and if so, how do you handle them?

I think in general I put pressure on myself to be good at what I’m doing, but I actually think I put less pressure on myself than I used to. I used to put so much pressure on myself to be booked for every line-up I could be booked for, to be busy all the time, to make music as much as I could, and to be obsessed with the idea of reaching whatever imaginary idea of success I had at the time.

Obviously, being motivated and putting the work in is good, but having an expectation of where you have to be is not the best thing. I think it’s good to have goals, but if you’re so obsessed with a very specific outcome, it actually takes away from you just doing what you’re doing, because if you don’t get that one thing, then you’re disappointed, even though you have this and this and this and this.

A lot of the pressure has been removed. I don’t get as worked up about how busy I am, or about whether I don’t get this press or that and it was a failure. Now I think it just comes with time and age. I’m not necessarily where I would want to be in the end, but I am very proud of how far I’ve come. I’m happy with the music and what it’s done, and I see a lot of potential in it. I just have a confidence that I’m growing, and as long as I’m growing, whether it’s slow or fast, I’m happy that it’s a trajectory. For example, the Volksbühne show last week, compared to my show a year ago, is like night and day; that to me is a huge win.

What I’m happy with in music has very much expanded and is very open-ended. I still like DJing, but I don’t necessarily have the same excitement about it as I did when I started. I would play shows for free. When I didn’t have a car, sometimes my mom would drop me off at my shows when I was in my early 20s. I don’t necessarily have that anymore; maybe I’m a little bit older, maybe I’m a little more focused on live music.

Is there a person who has changed the way you create music?

One person, no. But I think every artist I listen to, every artist I’ve worked with, and every producer I’ve collaborated with kind of did. I’m not someone who’s played an instrument their whole life. What I’ve learned about music is from observation, from listening, and from actually working together with people.

What do you have planned for the future?

My single PRETENDER comes out on the 27 October. It’s the first and only single for my EP. And then on November 10th, so in a few weeks, the EP comes out. A lot of the themes, if you read the lyrics, can feel a little bit vague, but you can kind of read between the lines of me going through things and figuring it out, looking at myself in the mirror, and processing the journey I was on towards healing and self-acceptance. I don’t want to say I was disappointed in myself, but almost like I was sad about how I felt. I was sad about the place I got to. I was sad about how hard things had become. I’m sad about the state I was in and remembering when I was happier, and thinking, what happened? How did I end up here? This EP coming out is very healing for me, and it was the first time I was really able to be vulnerable with myself. It feels done, and it feels right to put it out now. At the same time, I really need to put this out because it seems like people are connecting with it at shows, and I want them to be able to connect with it outside of the show.
Next, I want to work on an album, develop my live show, and come back to Europe. In the end, I’m just seeing what next year brings.

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