Bleep

Bibio is an artist who never likes to stay in one sound for too long. His humble beginnings producing lo-fi folk-tronica transformed dramatically into the hip hop inspired kaleidoscopes of his Warp debut Ambivalence Avenue, launching a series of constant shifts from intricate house beats to dazzling funk through to haunting ambient soundscapes, often all within the space of one album. While the quintessential Bibio sound may be hard to define, the guitar has stuck with him throughout all of his sonic experiments, and it’s what he pays homage to on his milestone tenth album.

“I like contrast between my albums,” says Stephen Wilkinson aka Bibio “When I finish an album, I crave doing something different for the next one.” BIB10 is perhaps the most outwardly pop Bibio has ever leaned into, delving deeper into the funk and disco direction previously hinted at with releases like 2016’s The Serious EP while his natural pastoral folk inflections still shine through. Though the slick riffs of tracks like ‘Off Goes The Light’ are dressed in fuzzy CRT television colours, they never fall into the trap of sounding nostalgic, featuring refreshing songwriting that can only be placed in modern day.

A metropolitan energy flows through many tracks, such as ‘S.O.L.’ with Olivier St. Louis’s silky, infectious vocals, or the sweet rotations of saxophone and guitar on ‘Cinnamon Cinematic’, trading jubilantly extended solos with each other. Elsewhere, Bibio’s hearty folk origins appear on the intimately drifting ‘A Sanctimonious Song’ and the acoustic ode to analogue on ‘Phonograph’. Both of these worlds are glued together in ‘Rain And Shane’, where lilting violin lends simultaneously wistful and soaring melodic refrains to twirling electric guitars.