| Stephen Wilkinson, the English composer/producer known as Bibio, was recommended to the experimental electronic music stalwarts at Mush Records by one of the genre's pacesetters, Boards of Canada's Marcus Eoin. Boards' take on electronic music is so eminent and frequently imitated that it's become almost a sub-genre in itself. Their seal of approval is a valuable currency, and their scintillating ambience is a clear influence on Bibio's music. So is the fractured mien of esoteric electronic acts like Aphex Twin and Autechre, who Bibio discovered while studying music at the University of London. Of these three influences, Autechre is the most cold and sterile; Boards the most emotive, although in this sort of music, emotion generally manifests as a tension between human desire and artificial systems - the raw stuff of feeling abstracted and viewed through a microscope. It seems to say: this is what it would feel like to feel, were genuine emotion possible in an age of ramifying obsolescence. To that end, Bibio inflates his music with more verdure and humanity than any of the aforementioned acts, as a large part of his style involves yoking heavily processed electronics to pastoral guitar lines and natural found sound, liked a glitched-out Windsor for the Derby. Bibio, apparently, is the name of a fishing lure Wilkinson's father used on trips to Wales where a young Stephen developed his love of natural sounds. Surprisingly, his naturalist aesthetic rubs placidly against the ambient disarray of his debut, fi, a shoegazing drone that pays homage to the natural world simply by documenting it - by listening, a simple thing that many of us often forget to do. Bibio sometimes veers toward the vanishing minimalism of Keith Fullerton Whitman, as on opening track "Cherry Blossom Road," where a quiet, beatific synth tone wraps around itself again and again. But just as often, he indulges a sort of breathy melodicism, as on the gleaming arpeggios of "Bewley in White" and "Looking Through the Facets of a Plastic Jewel." The album is not abrasive; in fact, it's soothing, but it is also saturated with distortion and synthetic effects that seem to represent technology's degradation of the equilibrium of ecological cycles. Or perhaps the modulating crackle winding through the idyllic guitar lines, birdsongs, and ambient wind effects represents nothing less than the human virus that creates the technology, which will eventually annihilate those tenuous, fragile sounds - a paranoid but viable vision with which Boards of Canada, too, seem familiar. But Bibio forgoes Boards' precise rhythmic thrust in favor of more meandering, ramshackle compositions that paint ephemeral imagery in broad strokes of primary colors, wafting through your peripheral vision. His analog bent and penchant for lo-fi, malfunctioning equipment bestow upon fi an aura of intimacy and transparency, where each sound that comprises the spacious armatures is discernible. It's a familiar formula - begin in serenity, introduce conflict, watch the theoretical dimensions unfurl - which Bibio, with his naturalist's disposition, eases through with a delicate and appreciative eye. One imagines strolling through a dewy glade and finding HTML tags, instead of lovers' initials, carved into the trees. - Pitchfork |
1XLP/Out Of Print