Bibio - Mind Bokeh

The anticipated follow up to his celebrated 2009 Warp debut, ‘Ambivalence Avenue’, this will certainly be
happy news to the countless number of fans he has won over since release of the last album. ‘Mind Bokeh’
(pronounced similarly to ‘bouquet’) is set to exceed expectations of existing fans and newcomers alike with
its full on, neon-lit pop whilst not compromising on any of the vintage, textured production that makes up
Bibio’s trademark sound.

An umami taster to ‘Mind Bokeh’ can found here: http://bit.ly/dKHCDY

The album will be released digitally, on CD and limited double vinyl, with initial ‘First Print’ copies of the CD
in a die cut sleeve.

For those not acquainted, Bibio's music may be more familiar to you than you'd expect. Not necessarily
because you've heard it before, but because even on first listen it triggers brilliantly hazy moments of deja
vu (or deja entendu) - that movie you saw on TV 20 years ago, that holiday you took with your parents,
the memory of which you now strangely cherish, the song that was number one at the time, that old, hand-
cranked music box you found in the attic, that old bossa nova vinyl, those sunblind, sherbet moments of your
formative years which now exist only in the recesses of your subconscious, blurry but as vividly coloured as
opal fruits.
Of course, there is the strong possibility you have heard his music before, as the soundtrack to scores of
Vimeo short films, or more recently in the current Amazon Kindle advert which took “Lovers Carvings”, a
favourite from his last album, as its soundtrack.

Taking his name from a fly his father used on fishing trips in his childhood, Stephen Wilkinson, aka Bibio has
moved swiftly up through the gears, from his 2005 debut ‘Fi’, in which he combined acoustic guitar and tape
loops, home and field recordings to create a wistful masterpiece that was at once organic and processed. “A
lot of those things are still in my work now but I'm looking to move away from that,” says Bibio. “I don't simply
want to be repeating myself.”

Those already familiar with Bibio for his discography of acclaimed albums will experience what Bibio
describes as a “balance of the familiar and the non-familiar” on Mind Bokeh, his latest and most
accomplished album. In fact, Mind Bokeh sounds like the neon, night-time counterpart to Ambivalence
Avenue's more pastoral, sunflecked tones.

For example, there's “Take Off Your Shirt”, which Bibio describes as being “about the frustrations of living in
English towns with little aspiration beyond getting boozed up, being vulgar and fighting.” It's a hybrid of Thin
Lizzy at their most silvery and pop-aggressive, with a blue eyed soulful feel reminiscent of 90s French house.
And what to make of “K Is For Kelson”, a chance encounter between Afrobeat and the theme to Starsky
And Hutch?

“What happens after writing music for many years is that your influence comes from within as well as
without – imaginary bands, an idea of what an era sounded like rather than necessarily the thing as
itself.”

As you might expect from an occidental West Midlands lad who's taken on board, via the late Alan Watts the
key tenets of Eastern philosophy, Bibio is paradoxical. Mind Bokeh is vivid and colourised, yet deliberate
in the way that it intrigues, triggers memory flashes and hits the pleasure points. It gets right in your head
without bashing you on the head. This, as Bibio explains, is the Japanese notion of Bokeh (pronounced
similarly to ‘bouquet’) as applied musically.
“Bokeh is the out of focus region of a photograph. It's not a quantifiable thing, but photographers and
lens manufacturers are obsessed with it. In Japanese it means “haze”, “blur”, or even “dementia”. I called
the album Mind Bokeh because I'm interested in the effect of defocussing your mind, whether through
meditation, chemicals or whatever – it's a state of mind quite alien to Westerners.”

Mind Bokeh is an album of quality and indistinction. “Wake Up!” is a blissful, warm blur, like screwing
your eyes as they adapt to the light of a gorgeous sunlit morning. “Saint Christopher” is a veritable lake
of a track, limpid, gorgeous, distressed, dappled. “Artist's Valley” is similarly reminiscent and idyllic, with
instamatic, gaseous eruptions of colour exciting nostalgia for some place you've never actually been. But
amid the sepia tints, the filters, the analogue crackle and the familiar/unfamiliar throbs an increasingly
emergent pop sensibility – take “Anything New”, with its Peter Frampton-style vocoders perceived through a
glass lightly.

Bibio is on the brink of big pop things but he's the anti-PT Barnum. He recalls (and firmly agrees with) a
quote he memorised from an old Boards of Canada interview, “always assume that the listener is the most
intelligent person imaginable. If you always think like that, you never insult the listener.” Mind Bokeh is the
album you deserve.

- David Stubbs

Tracklisting:

1. Excuses
2. Pretentious
3. Anything New
4. Wake Up!
5. Light Seep
6. Take Off Your Shirt
7. Artists' Valley
8. K is for Kelson
9. Mind Bokeh
10. More Excuses
11. Feminine Eye
12. Saint Christopher

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