In late 2017, Stephen Wilkinson released his ninth Bibio album, Phantom Brickworks. A masterful ambient drone experiment in the vein of Eno and Stars of the Lid, it was a surprising change of direction for Wilkinson – despite the fact no one seemed particularly surprised. He’s consistently proved himself adept at spanning genres, the electronic music he’s most closely associated with feeling more a necessitated attempt at labeling than any genuine reflection of the range of his musical output over the years. Now here with Ribbons, he continues to show marked progress in diversity even as he reverts back to the familiarity of his early work.
Bibio’s work has always been characterized by the skilled coalescence of folk and IDM – organic and digital instrumentation, natural field samples and synthesized loops, traditional modes of melodic songwriting and modern tools of texture and beat. Ribbons largely eschew the electronics and relies on the formers of these tenuous dichotomies. It’s all so very lovely and natural. With song titles drafted from the snapshots of a world witnessed as it tos and fros, the cover art a likeness of the stylized likeness of a windswept Wilkinson bursting with color, its a record that feels steeped in the energy that hums through all around us.
Indeed you could barely associate it with an electronic artist. There’s a gentle foray into looped samples through the middle with ‘You Couldn’t Even Hear the Birds Singing’ and ‘Pretty Ribbons and Lovely Flowers’, but it’s at its best when Wilkinson is letting his natural songwriting do the talking. Filled with gentle fingerpicked motifs and cavorting strings steeped in British folk traditions, Wilkinson’s voice – unschooled but honest and true – gently shades the melodies with idle wisdom in rhyming couplets. It’s most realized in the lovely Irish melodies that drift between violins and acoustic guitars of ‘The Art of Living’ and lead single ‘Curls’. But there’s space in his chosen sound on Ribbons for a wide array of style and influence.
‘Watch the Flies’ follows a similar line of folk balladry, but gives way to a virtuosic display of classical finger-picked guitar work. Bouncing funk rhythms and hazy psychedelia winds its way through ‘Before’ and ‘Old Graffiti’ while sunny distant melody of ‘It’s Your Bones’ is offset by its wavering and vaguely out of tune plucked guitars. Natural field recordings of birdsong and running water – what can be tired and played out – are used to lovely effect throughout and add even more life to the likes of ‘Erdaydidder-Erdiddar’ and ‘Patchouli May’, meandering medieval folk instrumentals that could easily have been pulled from samples of a wandering troupe of minstrels from days long past.
It’s a record that serves as a timely reminder of Wilkinson’s talent as a writer with his guitar. The instrument is consistently the star of the record and is the sole proponent of some of the album’s best moments. The beautifully crystalline melodic structures of opener ‘Beret Girl’ and ‘Valley Wulf’, formed wholly with fingerpicked electric guitars cloaked in reverb, are utterly gorgeous in their tranquillity. A trick he pulls again to close out the record with the lovely ‘Under A Lone Ash’, further serving to entrench what is a clear truth. He’s proving again that he’s one of the world’s most diverse and talented songwriters. But even as Bibio maps out world after world to explore in his music, the thread that binds it all is just how damn pretty it is. It makes all he does remarkably irresistible and is what will keep you coming back to Ribbons.
Bibio photo by Joe Giacomet
