Here's a guitar player from London who sounds like he was raised in Brazil, took his name from a fly fishing lure and creates electronic folk fusion field recordings. Y'know, grown up music.
The thing about Bibio that keeps me listening to his Warp debut Ambivalence Avenue is his range. The opening title track (below) is your more typical looped acoustic guitar pop number but the album moves through ballads of folk, ambient, funk and even instrumental hip-hop. It's the recipe for a beautiful record or an ostensible failure. Lucky for us, it's the former.
Not surprisingly, Bibio is a big fan of Boards of Canada (“Boards of Canada was more of an obsession than anything else”), who also approves of his work (“[Bibio is] the antidote to the modern laptopia of pristine electronic music” – Marcus Eoin). But Bibio takes Board's taste for samples and turns it into his project's main objective: at the very core of Bibio's electronic loops are a series of crackling field recordings. It's a place where movie samples live seamlessly next to his obsession with nature:
As a kid I used to dangle my mom's karaoke microphone out of my bedroom window at night and lie there listening to the rain on crappy headphones, secretly envying the stray cats and foxes for their wild and free lives and imagining what it’d be like to sleep behind the shed or under a bush.
It follows then that in my third year of university, I dedicated the academic year to as much location recording as I could manage, much of it consisted of recordings of rain and wind. During my years in the suburbs of London, I became less interested in the city and would rather spend my time amongst the pines of Trent Park near my house. So maybe rather than going shopping or hanging out in cafes or bars on a Saturday, I might be in a forest, recording a squeaky tree and later work it into compositions. And to this day, I never feel like I have enough recordings of rain.
My only complaint is that I couldn't upload one of the many other tracks on Ambivalence Avenue which show his delicate range. That's ok, 'cuz you can listen to more tracks here, or buy it from Warp like a mature person would do.
