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Bibio

Vignetting the Compost

(Mush; US: 3 Feb 2009; UK: 9 Mar 2009)

Review [25.Feb.2009]

Chris: How do you feel, patient 957?
Mrs. Hurdicure: Oh, um, like a, like a fresh towel, drying on the line on a summer’s day. Oh! I feel like a worm peekin’ it’s head out of the ground after a rainstorm and seein’ no robin. Oh-ha-ha-ha! I feel like God’s rubbing my tummy! You know, I haven’t felt this happy since my son came to visit at Christmas.
- From Kids In The Hall’s 1996 classic feature film Brain Candy


Memory is an odd thing. Although you can refer to certain events and periods in your own life, the human body completely regenerates itself every seven years, so the person that most of those things happened to no longer physically exists. In time, it can seem like those experiences happened in a movie or to someone else entirely. Basically, that is the sound Stephen “Bibio” Wilkinson has been cultivating throughout his career, one that has now achieved perfection.


Bibio’s third album of fuzzy nostalgia does everything it should. Somewhere nestled in its lackadaisical acoustic guitar, worn tape loops, ambient field recordings, and sun-bleached atmospheres is the sensation of your sister being brought home from the hospital as a baby, your favorite childhood Christmas, going fishing with your old man, all such vague yet pivotal moments. Upon hearing it, Vignetting The Compost will join them in the cobwebbed corners of your mind. There is no bass and often no real progressive song structure here to sink your teeth into. This is a happy haze on the brink of white noise, no more, no less.

Rating:

Ranta is a music geek from East Vancouver. He spends most of his time researching, procuring, listening to, and writing about music. Since 2004, his work has appeared in such publications as Exclaim!, CBC Music, Tiny Mix Tapes, and PopMatters, and he has been a Polaris Music Prize juror since 2010. He graduated from SFU's Contemporary Arts program with a BFA in music in Summer 2011.


Media
Bibio - Top Soil
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Much like Ambivalence Avenue, Bibio's latest offering, Mind Bokeh, should make him a household name.
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11 Dec 2009
We have no idea where the hell electronic music is going in the next decade, but if you can't find something in the wide stew of sonics out there to get excited about, check your pulse. You're probably dead.
3 Dec 2009
Bibio caps off what may prove to be the best year of his life with The Apple and the Tooth, a well-deserved victory lap and a celebration of his new identity.
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Bibio reinvents himself as a number of different people -- Neil Young, J Dilla, Ariel Pink, bands named after animals -- but retains a thematic proximity to the idea of the persistence of memory.
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