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Daisy Warne, aka BABii, is a multidisciplinary artist, who resides in the United Kingdom and produces ethereal tracks that explore her feelings and inner demons, but also how to deal and heal from them. BABii tries to transport her audience to an alternate reality full of eerie, heartfelt, yet entrancing energies. She creates this atmospheric collision through experimenting with spacey instrumentals, cyborg electronica, and whisper-like lyrics.

BABii was born and raised in a small medieval-like town in Yorkshire with her father. Reminiscing fondly, she says he was a man of many talents and a true connoisseur of antique objects and old vintage records. Through these shared experiences, she found herself exploring and playing in a world full of junkyards and ancient artefacts that eventually grew her fascination for craftsmanship and storytelling. Today, her sound – accompanied by uniquely produced transcendental melodies and electrifying graphics – carries these mysteries deeply ingrained in her art, transforming her imagination into reality.

After her parents split up when she was young, she went to live with her dad in Canada for a fresh start, and shortly after, when she was 16 in Brighton, she began her studies at the British Institute of Modern Music and got a degree in Music and Visual Art. Warne has mastered the art of bringing raw concepts into her creations. She feels an invisible fire within that stokes her creative spirit through which her musical accordance skillfully places the listener in a magical daze of luminescent animations and experimental harmonies.

BABII is an amalgamation of dark and light, the negative and positive, velvety but rough, and loud but hushed. Accessing all her resources around her, she creates the best sonic, lyrical, and visually appealing stories. These juxtapositions are intrinsic to her sound. BABII hints at a new project in 2021, an album consisting of ten tracks full of intimate experiences, paradoxes merged with her iconic DIY aesthetic. In the meantime, we are excited to share her latest single BRUiiSE.

Your music encapsulates such juxtapositions. Your soft whispered lyrics combined with experimental beats. The duality of dark and light. Looking back, has this contrast always been there for you?
Yeah, I have always been fascinated with the juxtaposition and duality of darkness and light. I generally love these symmetrical absolutes where one can’t exist without the other, and I am not talking about opposites but more like things that are reflections of one another, and two parts of a whole.
From a young age, I was exposed to the extremes of darkness and light, both in my internal world as well as my physical one, but in reality, things are much more complicated than absolutes. It’s a spectrum of a thousand colours and tones. I learnt there can be sadness in bliss, loneliness in love, comfort in violence and even kindness in evil. My whole life has been built on these contradictions and is at the core of my being. I have always been walking this line between darkness and light and it only seems fitting that this collision would appear in my music.
You express that you build worlds around your music. When did your fascination with story-telling come about and how does this influence the way you produce your music?
It’s easier to make music when you know the fantasy that it's being made in. I approach making music and all the things around it as if I was making a film. I would actually say I am influenced by films, TV and sometimes games way more than I am influenced by music.
I love these fully immersive worlds that captivate your senses, using storytelling, sound design, visual metaphors and music. So when I'm making music I take the feeling I am trying to convey, and I conjure a scene in my head that holds the same energy as the thing I am trying to express, and I let that guide my songwriting, production and sound design.
Your recent single Shadow is strongly influenced by UKG (UK Garage). Too often, women pioneers in electronic genres are overlooked. What do you think about the representation of women in this genre?
I can’t speak on behalf of the women in UKG, as I am not a part of that scene even though I have just released a UKG song. But, generally, in electronic music, there’s no denying that there has been inequality of gender.
In the past, electronic music, especially production, has very much been a boys club and that can be pretty intimidating if you feel like you don’t fit in because of gender or race. But if you really want something you will just go for it, no matter how scary or intimidating it might be.
For me, I had to find my confidence and grit, get brave and throw myself into the pit with the lads, and personally, I think the only way you level the playing field as a woman in this type of creative environment is by just being in it, being the best you can and not letting anyone doubt your abilities.
It’s scary but being the change you want to see is for sure the purest form of individual activism in my eyes.
You directed the music video for Shadow alongside Johny Goddard. There is an animated dragon roaming the dark skies behind you. How was the editing process of your captivating visuals?
That was kind of the boring part (laughs). Conceiving the idea was the most fun, the vibe of the video is just a small fragment of a much bigger picture.
I grew up in a big ancient industrial building in Yorkshire, which was full of all sorts of exciting junk and outside my front door we had a salvage yard and I wanted to capture my childhood imagination in places that felt the same for this video.

You create from your emotions, exploring and confronting both your negative and positive feelings. What would you tell people who don’t have that creative outlet to heal and deal with their emotions?
Everyone is different and how you heal is such a personal thing, but something that’s universal is to not be scared of your demons when they come to haunt you, don’t try and bury them deep in your brain and don’t try and fight them. Get excited about the opportunity to emotionally grow and bloom. Look at your demons from every angle and try to understand them in a way that works for you (such as, writing down things, talking about them, meditating on them, going to support groups, therapy, making things).
Once you fully understand your demons, they will transform into something that once made you weaker into something that will make you one hundred times stronger. Sadness is just energy, you’ve just got to figure out how to use it.
Together with Iglooghost and Kai Whiston, you created an interactive club night called Grid where you transport people into an alternative reality through animated clubbing and treasure hunts. Could you tell us a little about how this started?
I was just the inventor for Grid, as it started around the time of my first album, so I couldn’t do the shows. It was a bit of an experiment and to see if we could bring an extra element into a clubbing environment.
Igloo has always been a puzzle maker, so we thought it would be cool to throw that into the mix. I made machines that used tokens to interrupt the DJ set and trigger an unreleased song, and all the tokens were hidden around the club.
Igloo and Kai toured it around Asia, and they told me that people reacted in so many different ways, the gimmick was a success but turns out drunk people can be pretty unpredictable, so it didn’t always go to plan.
What other stories do you have from Grid?
We also did a grid show in the UK for the release of our collaborative album XYZ in the tiniest venue and it was so out of control, but so much fun. It was way over capacity and everything kept breaking. Someone fell into the machines and they had to all be put back together again during the show, but it didn’t really ruin anything and everyone was still bouncing off the walls, screaming and sweating on each other, so I would say it was a success.
It would be cool to do it again in the future but make the machines bigger, stronger and more party proof.
You mentioned that you studied art and music when you were younger. How did this stimulate the evolution of BABii?
I left home and went to music school when I was 16 and I was very shy when it came to performing when I arrived, to the extent that I would have panic attacks and cry cause I was so frightened.
I found myself in this environment where I had the opportunity to face my fear of performing every day, and I had this natural instinct to just keep doing it no matter how horrible it felt. It became kind of addictive, it was like one of those pains that feel good even though it hurts and every time I did it, it got a little easier. I think I was going to about three open mic nights a week on top of going to school too, I am not lying when I say it became some sort of addiction.
So, it definitely helped build my confidence and learn how to control my nerves. I later went to art school, where I studied music and visual art, which was this strange collation between expressive arts, performance art, sound art and fine art. It was some of the most fun and confusing times of my life.
I’m still untangling what I learnt at art school, but one thing I can say it taught me was how to define the concept in the things I make and that’s something that has stuck with me until this very day.

Junkyards contain a lot of ‘mystery cases.’ What are some of the weirdest items you have come across roaming junkyards?
Well, I grew up in a place that was pretty akin to a junkyard, but it was full of old antiques, as well as junk and there was more weird items than you can ever imagine, but to give you a few examples.
For some reason, my dad acquired a whole bunch of stuffed cats, I don’t know if it was overtime or all in one go, but some guy came in and bought them all for his wife cause she loved cats. We also somehow acquired a second-hand coffin (it wasn’t used, don’t worry) and I have this memory of my dad getting inside of it for a laugh, and I was sitting on the lid laughing my head off and he started to freak out cause he couldn’t breathe and I couldn’t hear him for a good minute before getting off the lid.
Then, our neighbour, Gary, decided to sleep in it and woke up gasping for air in the night. I think the moral here is don’t get in coffins unless you’re already dead.
Do you have any other stories you'd like to share?
And one more, someone once sold my Dad some stuff they had stolen from a church, including something crazy, like a statue of Jesus on the cross. My Dad recalls loads of bad things happening during the time that he had it and believed he had been cursed by God or something, so he made sure it all got returned to the church to try and rid himself of this holy curse.
Your new album, MiiRRoR really blew my mind. It is absolutely unbelievable; I was hooked for the full ten tracks. I loved Waste, your dreamy voice in the background expressed “I lost my voice between my thighs.” It has a great balance between slow dreamlike grooves and super synthetic ones. What is your vision for this song?
Thank you so much, any Igloo fans will know that this is yet another version of this mysterious song originally called iiNViiSiiSiiLiiTy. It's a song that’s ‘frankensteined’ together from lots of very old songs, that all fit together within a theme, and it ended up becoming a collaboration with Iglooghost.
 A very old version of this song ended up in a mix somewhere, and people kept asking what it was and when it was going to come out, and I never really intended on ever releasing it because it was one of my oldest songs, it was unfinished and half of the project files were missing. So we decided to remake it and stick it together with all these other lost songs.
It felt really important to try and stay true to the essence of the original songs and Iglooghost did a really amazing job of keeping the songs' identities, while taking it to this otherworldly space with his god-tier production skills.
You mentioned you like to work with your hands and also create other objects, other than music. Do you also produce these objects with the same sense of duality you do music?
It really depends on what I am making them for. What I love most about making things with my hands, is that it doesn’t involve looking at a screen and it becomes quite a mediative process. Your mind can just drift around naturally as you do it and there is something so satisfying about physical products.
I have a real love for craftsmanship and I think it comes from my dad, who has not only spent a lot of his life not only collecting dusty antiques but also collecting junk and occasionally transforming it into beautiful things.
He’s also a very skilled and resourceful builder and can turn his hand to anything, he could build a palace from a junkyard if he wanted to. He even built an entire life-size medieval village in the warehouse I grew up in as a child.
The resourcefulness he has taught me and the confidence he has shown me in being able to make anything if you have to or want to, has given me what is probably one of my greatest powers and I truly owe a lot of it to him.
What would you tell baby BABii if you could go back in time?
Nothing, despite it being incredibly hard and heartbreaking, I wouldn’t want to interrupt the journey I have been on throughout life in anyway every drop of goodness has been as important as the bad.

Words
Emma Smit

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