| It’s easy to hear why Board of Canada’s Marcus Eoin is a fan of Bibio. All the layered vintage samples, complex arrangement of modified guitars and synth, and nostalgic melodies of Vignetting The Compost take cues from the ambient psychedelic aesthetic of Boards of Canada. If there’s any fault to the record, it’s that some of the tracks follow that aesthetic too closely, too reverently, but British producer Stephen Wilkinson tosses in some surprising elements. Wilkinson sings on only a handful of songs, but during the few times he does, he takes American folk melodies and Appalachian folk guitar arrangements and pushes them through what resembles a sun-baked vinyl press to create a beautiful, crackling bricolage of vintage sounds. One of the great innovations of Boards of Canada was to take samples from 1970s nature documentary films and produce something sublime and atavistic. Bibio extends that concept by taking found samples and field recordings of live birds, frogs, and insects and combining them with distorted flute and muffled keyboards. What results is akin to listening to one of those instrumental songs from live-action and animated shorts from old episodes of Sesame Street, where the music plays along to footage of children at a carnival or fair, and I mean that in the best way possible. - Evil Monito |
