Music Interview: Bibio

DOWNLOAD MP3: Bibio - Mr. and Mrs. Compost

Stephen Wilkinson is best known as Bibio, that practitioner of audio botany and warped soundscapes that seem to leap out of your speaker like passages from a timeless novel or folk story. Famously described by Boards of Canada as “the antidote to the modern laptopia of pristine electronic music”, Wilkinson’s distinct sound forces a discerning melodic language through a dense jungle of tape hiss and bend, to mesmerising effect. With a three-album career on Los Angeles off-hiphop label Mush (Fi (2005), Hand Cranked (2006) and 2009’s Vignetting The Compost) and a new, less-serene EP (Ovals And Emeralds, which he describes as sounding like a “cursed travelling circus”), Bibio’s music is now an established feature in the collections of musicologists and chill-seekers alike. I chatted to Wilkinson about his music, recording techniques and philosophy, before he jumps ship to Warp records for a new album, Ambivalence Avenue, which sees him move into even stranger territories.

MS: Can you explain the title of your latest album ‘Vignetting the Compost‘?

SW: “Well, it is kind of a reference to that particular approach to drawing, painting and photography (vignetting). The approach of an unfinished scene, no definite frame, dissolving at the edges. But it also has a more philosophical side. The idea of a vignette is a small focused spot of attention on a moment or a place. Thomas Bewick’s vignettes struck a chord with me, particularly a little scene of a woman hanging out the washing. They’re similar to Haiku poems. The are short, transient if you like, and reflect a little moment in life. No matter how grand the art, no matter how meticulous and cathedral-like our masterpieces, all we really ever do is make vignettes when you plot them against the constant flux that is the universe. But in transiency resides beauty. In the constant striving and battling and inventing and forward thinking of the human race, it seems in these little private moments, resting from the heat under the shimmering shade of a tree, I find connection and meaningless purpose.”

That it is in these ephemeral moments of no planning, striving or forward thinking I find immeasurable beauty and peacefulness, and that glimpse of Brahmic splendour. All this is present in simplicity, divine simplicity, like observing a wagging bough or the multi-coloured flare in my eyelashes as I squint in the sunshine. We all have these moments, in city and in forest they smiled like me and you. ‘Vignetting The Compost‘ is partly about the seamless cycle of life and death, simultaneously decomposing as it miraculously recomposes. A celebration that there really is no death. Some of the lyrics may seem morbid at first, but there is an intentional and admittedly romantic assurance throughout the album that love and beauty are the things that bind it all together, this beauty may come riding on waves of pain and sorrow. “Torn under the window light” was named after a mystical sensation when trying to sleep off heartbreak when I was 17 years old, the evening summer sun poured through the window like honey and glistened in my soaked sore eyes. All moments have their place. Sometimes the hard times are the most memorable, but the pain decomposes and sprouts something verdant if you give it chance.”

MS: Are you a bit of a photography buff?

SW: “I wouldn’t say that. I do love taking photographs and I care about the way I take photographs. I care about the format, the grain, the impurities. I like film, particularly medium format. I love my Rolleiflex, my holga and my lomo. I like the fact that different film stock has different properties and you can experiment physically with it, like cross-processing and bleaching, scratching, letraset transfers etc. My photography generally reflects a desire to capture moments in life but often not easily placed in time, I walk around the forest or field or city and look for things to frame. I’m a bit trigger happy and it’s an expensive hobby!”

MS: How do you feel Vignetting… compares to your first two albums (Fi and Hand Cranked)?

SW: “It’s more layered, more meandering, more colourful and polyphonic. It has elements of both of the previous albums but it takes the story-telling a little further. It’s admittedly more out in the open and less obscure. It feels like the 3rd in the trilogy, although that wasn’t initially the plan. It all fell into place.”

MS: Hand Cranked, I’m guessing could be an allusion to cassette tape. What role does tape play in the making of a Bibio record?

SW: “It’s an important textural component. It’s used to give musical instruments or sound a physical characteristic, like when spots of light cast upon a flakey painted wall. It also serves the purpose of making things sound old, to make them seem like they are a memory that is fading, this brings the melancholy out. Even a happy tune can be made melancholy by changing its texture, and this fascinates me a lot. I’ve had arguments with sound-art snobs who talk down melody and rhythm for all of its grid-like rigidity, then I throw a curve at them and ask why then the texture of a melody affects its mood? For me this demonstrates that melody and rhythm are inseparable from sound and noise. This is now obvious to me, but for some, the illusion of separateness still blinkers their ideals with music and sound, politics is usually a barrier between artists agreeing. I think trying to belittle music with intellectual reasoning is like trying to convince someone that liking strawberries is shallow. I prefer to just enjoy and shut up, or at least wax lyrical.”

MS: Your albums so far have been released by Mush, a label perhaps better known for releasing leftfield hip-hop. How did you link up with them?

SW: “I was running out of UK labels to send demos to and then Marcus Eoin of Boards of Canada told me to consider the USA, in particular Mush. The recommendation helped a great deal in getting heard I think. Out of all the demos I sent in the UK, Marcus was the first to get back, and that was a year and a half after sending it. I was over the moon.”

MS: Can you tell us about the Ovals And Emeralds EP. Does it exhibit a darker slant to your work?

SW: “Yes. It’s inspired by my irrational childhood flashes of fear. Gloomy days, discordant polyphonic howling wind through the gap in the window frame, long draping curtains that move and the picture of the clowns with poppies above the stairs. The whole EP is a concept EP to a certain degree. A cursed traveling circus. There are clues in the titles, I don’t want to spoil the show so I’ll leave it with you.”

MS: Without removing the mystery, can you share some more about the creative and studio processes behind your music?

SW: “I think there are different attitudes towards recording technology. There is a school that is obsessed with ‘realism’ or ‘clarity’. That school also probably prefers to have everything brand spanking new and up to date. Everything is justified for its faithfulness to the original source, everything is logical and all factors of coloration are eliminated. This school is responsible for the most boring production in the history of music in my opinion. I’ve learned stuff from not having access to high end gear, but also listening to old records and realising that it is distortion, saturation, wobble, hiss and a loss of frequencies that makes music production exciting; it is when technology makes its mark on the music, rather than acting as a transparent means to capture music. Motown is a prime example. If all of those gorgeous distorted tracks were done in a pro tools rigged studio, they’d sound soulless. So to answer your question, I look for ways of filtering stuff, distorting, saturating and giving stuff wobble and crackles and dust. It might be putting a vocal track through the filter of an analogue synth, or it might be putting a drum track through a valve guitar amp and blending it with the original to get a wet/dry mix of clean and distorted drums. It might be transferring individual stems onto a special ’saturation-station’ which comprises of 2 reel to reel tape machines working as one. It might be playing a guitar track out of a little speaker and miking it up. All of these are ideas, but it takes awareness, skill and experience to get it to sound right for the track you’re working on. Sometimes, the right microphone in front of the right source is enough, but as far as right and wrong goes, it should always be instinctive, not based on a previously made list of instructions. People who talk of a logical right and wrong in music do my head in.”

MS: People often reference folk when describing your music. How influential have folk and traditional music been to you? Have any artists or movements been particularly inspiring?

SW: “Folk has had very little to do with my musical upbringing. In fact most of the native folk music out there is probably horrendous to my ears. As I play the guitar, I was glad to discover Nick Drake and The Incredible (String) Band because they influenced my approach to the guitar. Neither of those artists are really folk. There’s this attitude towards music that if it’s got acoustic guitar finger picking in it - it’s folk. Quite ridiculous when you think about it. Finger picking guitar can be a component of horrific twee shit, or it can be cool as fuck. Nick Drake was ahead of his game in my opinion, his harmonies and melodies were really forward thinking, particularly in his album ‘Pink Moon‘, which sounds modern now. Pink Moon is the one for me, that’s up there with the best albums of all time. ISB were just nuts, trying to pin them down would be like trying to catch a river in a net. But their tangled string sound is what influenced me, and also the mantra like droney stuff, the psychedelic Indian influenced stuff. I plan to learn the Sitar at some point.”

MS: There are obvious allusions to nature throughout your work. You’ve already touched upon ideas of life cycles and vitality in this interview, what kind of connection does the natural world have with your music?

SW: “Texture mainly. As I’ve already said, the ’straight to pro tools’ sound ain’t my bag. I like to try and make my music have intricate layered depth and quality, even if the track itself is simple, compositionally. Materials found in nature are often heavily textured and intricate, just look at the bark of an oak tree. I might, in some kind of way, approach a track to get it to sound like the way oak bark looks. Also there’s the atmosphere in music that is inspired by nature. I’ve made tracks that started with a guitar riff which reminds me of flickering spots of light casting on the pavement through the leaves of a tree, so then I’ve immediately got something worth pursuing in terms of making it into a full track, and then the aim is to keep sight of that atmosphere when layering the other sounds/instruments. It’s little things like that, if I can make a track that makes me and hopefully other people feel like they’re in the shade of a sycamore, I feel like I have achieved something in terms of communication via art. I once read a description someone made about one of my tracks: ‘walking down a dirt path in a light snow’. Comments like that please me more than a gushing review.”

MS: Does the forthcoming album (Ambivalence Avenue, due this summer on Warp) mark a new phase in your work? Or the end of an old one?

SW: “A new phase, although it’s difficult to decide what that phase is, because the album is diverse in its styles, so I think that new phase is to keep hammering out tracks and not sticking to one thing. There’s more of a pop element to the Warp debut, but the kind of pop I’m influenced by is 70s Brazilian pop, or anything that sounds like it could be on an old Sesame Street vignette.”

MS: Since it’s kind-of-nearly spring, could you give us a playlist of five tracks you would play to welcome the impending season?

SW: “Smell - Tidy Kid
Maybe - Letherette
Aguas De Marco - Joao Gilberto
Os Ossos Do Barao - Marcos Valle
Phoenix - Daft Punk.”

MS: What’s next for Bibio?

SW: “A debut album on Warp records, hopefully June. This one is going to sound different. There’s a taster on myspace.com/mrbibio.”

Bibio’s back catalogue is available from Mush Records and Amazon MP3 Store, and the lead single from his forthcoming LP, Ambivalence Avenue, is available for pre-order from Warp Records.

Posted in Interviews & Music by Martin Skivington on May 29, 2009.

Facebook This!   Tweet This!   Grab the Earz Mag RSS feed  

More Articles:

Review: Bibio - Vignetting The Compost In a similar vein to The Books, Bibio (Stephen Wilkinson) makes instrumental mood pieces, based around...

Review: Bibio - Ambivalence Avenue Stephen Wilkinson, a.k.a Bibio, follows up February's wonderful Vignetting The Compost with a jaunt to...

Review: Lone - Cluster Dreams EP Nottingham-based beatmaker producer Lone is — to some well-worn hip-hop terminology — "on...

Podcast: The Garden Party / Compunctio Records It was 2008 when we last did a podcast for Earz Mag, so there's a lot to catch up on in this episode!...