| Most songwriters probably have cassettes or CDs on which, like the author's notebook or the painter's sketchbook, they record fragments of sound and scraps of ideas that can later be turned into part of a whole song. And since these muses don't always have a full studio nearby, and because they're only documenting rough sketches anyway, the recordings are usually of dubious fidelity. Most songwriters don't simply go ahead and release these jots and snippets, which is almost what this nature boy from central England seems to have done. Sure, there's a little more to it than that - Bibio's songs often feature multiple tracks of instruments - but their simplicity of structure and four-tracked hissiness sound like a tape another artist might label "ideas for later." In Bibio's hands, these seemingly tossed-off creations take on an otherworldly allure and lull you into a drift-like state, where the rigid confines of bridges, middle eights, choruses and studio effects would be of no use but to jolt you out of your reverie. Bibio (real name: Stephen Wilkinson) was recommended to Mush by Boards of Canada's Marcus Eoin, but despite the electronic and avant-hip-hop implications of these associations, his sound has much more in common with the pastoral verity of California's Jewelled Antler collective. The beats here are negligible, and in their stead is an unrelenting breeze of hazy-ambient guitar-based impressionism. Wilkinson nicked his moniker from the fly his father used during their fishing trips to Wales, trips that helped seal the boy's love affair with nature. Like Glenn Donaldson and his ilk, Bibio uses location recording to capture particular outdoor sound environments impossible to reproduce in-studio. And so a song like "Wet Flakey Bark" is easy to imagine being laid down in a damp forest with its namesake in sight. The almost grotesquely distorted "London Planes" sounds like it was recorded at the bottom of a puddle, but that just adds to the virtual reality sensory transference that makes the whole of fi so absorbing. Of course, it'd be easy for a musician to use techniques like lo-fi recording and heavy repetition to mask a lack of skills, but Bibio has chops, as evidenced by the spread-out triumvirate of "Bewley in White," "Grey" and "Red." Here, his giddy, finger-picked guitar (which, with its bluegrassy sound, was probably played on a hollow-body) darts laps around the accompanying flutes and organ drones. On tracks like these, and the lovely multi-guitars of "Puffer," Bibio succeeds famously at making his four-track compositions sound like the discarded debris of some never-seen woodland genius. - Splendid |
1XLP/Out Of Print