Send "Bibio " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 After five full-lengths and a few EPs, Stephen Wilkinson's Bibio project continues to surprise. His first three albums combined tape-distressed versions of British folk with warbly ambient interludes, and he gradually added vocals that hinted at proper songs. During this stretch, he seemed like someone who wanted to completely master one idiom before he could muster the courage to move on to another. But on his 2009 album, Ambivalence Avenue, Wilkinson moved outside of his comfort zone. His ear for mood and texture was still there, but suddenly his vocals were up front and he was tossing in hip-hop breaks and dense samples to craft a weirdly bent style of electro-pop. It was an exhilarating record. You could feel an artist stepping outside of himself and venturing boldly into new territory, and the sense of adventure was contagious.Mind Bokeh is no less daring than Ambivalence Avenue, and it covers just as much ground, but here you can feel Wilkinson bumping up against his limitations. His talent for production is fully intact, but some odd choices sabotage the record. Instrumental sections like the title cut and the closing "St. Christopher" show a sound technician firmly in command of his material, folding twinkly keyboards, crackly loops, and gently insistent beats into tracks that are evocative and detailed enough to reveal more with repeated listens. Wilkinson's terrific understanding of sound is undiminished, and he still moves easily between genres and gets most of the key details right. But the further he explores recognizable song forms, the more often the album stumbles....full text |
| Essentiallyeclectic.wordpress |
| If you don’t already know, Bibio is a man named Stephen Wilkinson who makes things go boom-bap. This wasn’t always the case. His earlier work on Mush Records utilised looped guitar and analogue tape recordings to produce collections of ambient melodies and moods (see albums Fi, Hand Cranked and Vignetting the Compost for more info), a style that Wilkinson dubbed ‘saturated folk’. Perhaps influenced by his work studying ‘sonic arts’ at university in London, the Wolves-based producer possesses a maturity of composition that is becoming more and more prevalent amongst his contemporaries, as the sampler continues its journey towards exciting and creative instrument status. A recent move to Warp Records (a place where almost everything goes boom-bap, albeit often in a slightly wonky way) changed all of that. Wilkinson’s first effort for the label, 2009’s Ambivalence Avenue, is a thrilling collection of intriguing beat-driven music that sometimes sounds like it’s about to fall over but never quite does. That was probably a Warp influence too. Wilkinson’s earlier guitar work was not abandoned, but augmented by the prominent rhythm beds on which it sat, weaving nostalgic fingerpicked melodies with light synth work. Online book floggers Amazon even deemed ‘Lovers’ Carvings’ uplifting chords suitable to blast out all over recent adverts for its Kindle. Mind Bokeh is a natural follow up, continuing where Ambivalence Avenue left off. Indeed, at points it heavily references its predecessor. ‘Light Sleep’ rethinks the wah-wah funk of ‘Jealous of Roses’, while ‘More Excuses’ contains lyrical echoes of ‘All the Flowers’. The cut-up beats of ‘Fire Ant’ make a reappearance on ‘Anything New’, and the sepia-toned guitar work of previous albums is back on ‘Artist’s Valley’....full text |
| Slantmagazine |
| Like karma, apparently there are good and bad versions of "bokeh," a photography term referring to image blur. Bibio—a.k.a. British producer Stephen Wilkinson—has called his fifth album Mind Bokeh, a "balance of the familiar and the non-familiar," but it's clear from the music's tone, atmosphere, and general pace that it's less about the dynamic between two dissimilar concepts than about producing an intriguingly sensuous haze. Blending glitchy electronica tempos with the trippy vibes of indie folk, Wilkinson has crafted a noisy, writhing record full of morose, urban landscapes and exotic textures. As its name suggests, Mind Bokeh is fluid and formless, committing to pop structure and melodies one moment only to eschew them the next, often all within the same track. There's no better example of Wilkinson's deft hand than "Pretentious," which begins with a haunting, slicing harp reminiscent of Bat for Lashes, blooms into a ponderous, jangly funk tune a minute in, and then deconstructs its melody with nightmarish glee toward an eerie, false conclusion. After 15 seconds or so of silence, the earlier, sunnier hook eases in to offer a charmed, retro jazz-lounge farewell. And so, as with much of the mysterious Mind Bokeh, soundscapes fade in and out with a teasing uncertainty. If Wilkinson's songs were sentences, there would be ellipses at both ends, neither starting nor ending with any definitive certainty. Mind Bokeh thus reflects the confused despair of Wilkinson's narratives in its music: In tracks like "Wake Up!" or "Feminine Eye," his vocals are painted in disturbing but beautiful harmonies, his lyrics vague and pleading. When he asks, brokenly, "How was I supposed know?" in "Excuses," listeners can hear an ambiguous doom behind his words. There are highlights beyond the esoteric and tragic funk though. "Artists' Valley" stretches and snaps behind stream-of-consciousness observations, moving confidently atop the revolving pluck of its guitar sample. On "Anything New," Wilkinson infuses a start-stop rhythm with the buttery sounds of glo-fi, the groovy, flute-like synths far outstripping anything from chillwave master Toro y Moi's recent Underneath the Pine. But it's the penultimate "Saint Christoper"—a wistful, six-minute odyssey of skittering samples and analog fuzz—that catches Wilkinson at his best: Wonderfully lacking in self-awareness, intimate to a fault, and yet coolly intriguing, with an undeniable confidence in conveying the unfocused, alluring beauty of "bokeh....full text |
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