Bibio is something of a musical chameleon. Not many artists have the confidence to take a sharp left-turn from sumptuous synth-funk to spectral ambient in the space of two albums, but Stephen Wilkinson has never been afraid to experiment.
It’s a testament to the singularity of Wilkinson’s production, however, that both projects - the glossy, playful grooves of 2022’s BIB10 and the elegiac drone of this year’s Phantom Brickworks (LP II) - while both departing from the tape-worn alt-folk for which he’s best known, somehow sound recognizably his own.
Wilkinson is that rare combination of gifted musician and skilled producer. He’s also a lo-fi maven; his earliest experiments were captured by budget samplers and cassette tapes, their wistful loops and fingerpicked instrumentals tinted with an arresting shade of melancholy by his equipment’s scuzz and warble. Though these caught the attention of Warp Records - a label he remains with two decades later - it was 2009’s Ambivalence Avenue that became Wilkinson’s breakout release, peeling away a layer of lo-fi grit to reveal a brighter, poppier sound.
In the years since, Wilkinson has built a carefully curated studio centred around a five-figure console, but he remains dedicated to balancing the clarity and convenience of professional recording with the aesthetics of lo-fi. “Since Ambivalence Avenue I’ve been trying to somehow merge both worlds,” he tells us. “A pristine recording of something feels more real, whereas a lo-fi recording covered in grain that has blurred edges, smeared details and faded colour is less like reality. That can be a very powerful thing.”
Wilkinson’s latest release is Phantom Brickworks (LP II), a sequel to a project released in 2017 that found its inspiration in disused industrial sites and ghostly, forgotten locations across the United Kingdom, blurring the lines between myth and memory. Wilkinson’s music has long lingered on places and landscapes, but where previous albums often possessed a comfortingly pastoral glow, all birdsong and verdant meadows, the Phantom Brickworks project revealed a darker and more disquieting side to his sound.
Like its predecessor, Phantom Brickworks (LP II) is an austere and impressionistic collection of ambient pieces, its improvised recordings looped through a treasured vintage delay pedal, the identity of which (we’re sad to say) remains a closely guarded secret. As Wilkinson successively lays down loop on top of loop, the sound begins to smear, fade and decay, distilling the haunted beauty of his titular settings in woeful drones and distant echoes, all coated in a thick layer of hiss and crackle.
We caught up with Bibio following the release of Phantom Brickworks (LP II) to find out more about his studio set-up, the creative process behind this latest project, and where his restless urge to experiment might take him next. (Here’s a clue: it involves MIDI-controllable fairground organs.)
How did you get into music production initially? What kind of set-up were you using when you started?
“I started experimenting with recording music when I was a child using a cassette recorder. I never had a Portastudio as a kid, but learned a crude overdubbing technique with a Goodmans boombox with a twin cassette deck using two tapes: by recording something onto a tape in one deck, then swapping the tapes over (only one deck could record, the other could play), then I could play back what I’d just recorded and dub it whilst simultaneously recording a new track to a second tape in the record deck.
“If you keep repeating this process you can layer tracks, but the quality deteriorates with each layer as you’re making multiple generations, the first tracks you lay down get copied the most amount of times, so they become the murkiest - there’s also no way to mix levels afterwards, they’re all baked together. I also tried this technique on my mom’s karaoke machine which had a twin cassette deck, and later revived the technique with two MiniDisc recorders when I was at uni.
"The early experiments using cassettes as a kid got me tuned into the artifacts of older analogue recordings"
“Another key piece of gear was a budget sampler (which is one of my secret pieces), I had this for my 20th birthday while still at college. It doesn’t have a lot of sampling time, you can get more sampling time by reducing the quality, which makes things sound kind of ‘hairy' as they become coated in noise, a bit like fluff on a turntable stylus. The first tracks I made under the Bibio name were made with this sampler - about four years before I got my first computer since my Commodore 16+4 in 1985 - and I used this sampler heavily on Fi, Hand Cranked, and Vignetting The Compost. It made a bit of a return later on, in tracks such as Wren Tails, Curls, and Oakmoss.
“I didn’t start using a computer for music until 2002, which is when I got my first iMac. The early experiments using cassettes as a kid got me tuned into the artifacts of older analogue recordings, as well as growing up watching films and documentaries made in the ‘60s and ‘70s, so as a teen in the ‘90s I was drawn to music that sampled old crackly recordings with lots of atmosphere, like Portishead’s album Dummy and some stuff on Mo Wax - the main thing that drew me to hip-hop was sampling, not rapping, in fact I always preferred instrumental hip-hop.”
How does that compare to your current studio set-up?
“I’ve got too much gear now, it would take too long to talk about it! [laughs] I’m actually in the process of selling loads of gear, as I’ve collected more than I realised. But it’s through purchasing gear that you discover what you like - there’s stuff I’d never want to sell and there’s stuff I don’t care about.
“Sometimes I can be on the verge of selling something and then give it another chance, and then I’ve totally changed my mind. This happened with my Roland V-Synth GT. I was thinking of selling it years ago, then decided to get it out of storage and give it another chance in my studio, and then I totally clicked with it and it’s stayed on the synth rack ever since.
“When I made Pretty Ribbons and Lovely Flowers with it, I truly realised the power it had. I had made tracks with it before then, such as Ivy Charcoal from the first Phantom Brickworks album, but then I put it in storage and kind of forgot about it. I’m glad I didn’t sell it. I use it strictly as a sampler, but it can do things that my other samplers can’t.”
Can you pick out one or two pieces of kit that were fundamental to the sound of Phantom Brickworks (LP II)?
“The equipment used for Phantom Brickworks is very minimal. Most of it is live improvised looping using ‘80s digital delay pedals, which are also guarded secrets. The piano tracks are all made with the same piano that I’ve been using for over 20 years. It’s moved house with me a couple of times and will be moving with me again next year. The black gloss paint was stripped, removing the maker’s name, so I don’t know the manufacturer, although it says 'BRITISH MANUFACTURE' on the harp.
“My girlfriend’s parents liberated it from a school in the ‘80s for her to learn piano on when she was a child, and I’ve been using it since we met in 1996. My piano tuner thinks it might be from the 1920s-1930s. Another key instrument is baritone electric guitar. I have a few of them now but I mostly use my Gibson Les Paul Studio baritone. I changed the pickups to Lollartrons and I usually use a volume pedal and a Strymon blueSky reverb pedal with it, which gives me this distinctive droney sound, but the looping is done in one of the ‘80s delay pedals I previously mentioned, which have loads of character as the loops get murky and crumbly as they repeat.”
Can you talk us through one or two techniques that you use in the studio to achieve the kind of sounds and textures heard on the project?
“As I said, a lot of the tracks are improvised loops with either baritone guitar or piano. On this album there are some other techniques used too. In 2020, over a couple of days, I made a simple set up with a volume pedal and a couple of vintage digital delays. Rather than using a guitar or piano as the source, I scoured YouTube for things to sample. This ranged from cheesy relaxation Chinese flute music to old documentaries.
"I scoured YouTube for things to sample. This ranged from cheesy relaxation Chinese flute music to old documentaries"
“The technique involved more or less randomly ‘grabbing’ bits of audio by feeding the audio from YouTube into the volume pedal, and then the delays. I would use my foot to fade in random bits of audio into a loop and then keep adding to it - filling in the gaps with other bits of audio to make a pattern of cross-fading samples. It’s very hit and miss, as it’s so easy to mess up a loop by fading together parts that don’t work, but I’d just keep doing it until I got a loop going that was beautiful, then I’d leave it running for a while so it started to get grainier.
“I did loads of these tracks, sampling all sorts of stuff, and made over an album’s worth of music over two days. I compiled the best takes and burned them onto a CD, which was the first time I’ve burned a CD in over a decade. I made two copies and gave one to a friend. I called it Shuffle Drones as it was intended to be played on shuffle, but one of the tracks made it as the last track on Phantom Brickworks (LP II).
“I’ve used this technique in the past; it can be very rewarding as so much of it is down to chance, so my role becomes more like a listener and a selector, which is quite different to playing every single note by hand. For Dorothea’s Bed, I took a Vashti Bunyan acapella and repitched the whole verse using Melodyne to make it more melancholy, then I reversed it and played it through a tape echo, this became the foundation of the track, to which I added other layers such as Minimoog bass and Mellotron.”
You’ve spoken before about preferring working with analogue gear to software. What is it you prefer about analogue over digital?
“Actually, I love analogue, digital and software. I just love them for different things, and I need all of them. I prefer analogue synths to software emulations, and I prefer tape and valve amps to emulations, but software is essential too. I record and arrange in Logic and it’s a wonderful tool, it allows me to turn my imagination into a reality and it’s also a great tool for having a conversation with myself, musically speaking. Multi-tracking is still what I love most, as in layering musical ideas, that’s what I’m best at.
"I love analogue, digital and software. I just love them for different things, and I need all of them"
“Live looping is similar to multi-tracking, but I use very primitive gear for that, so there’s no undo function, for example. The Phantom Brickworks improvisations all work within this limitation of making live loops on a delay pedal without the ability to undo, so it’s all about making patterns that slowly evolve and decay. I favour these vintage digital delays over modern ones because the loops get grainier and murkier and noisier as they repeat, like the music is dissolving or breaking apart, and that gives the music a haunting quality. The loop is constantly evolving, new notes are added, and the earlier notes become more ghostly as they lose their definition, similar to multiple generations on tape.”
Tape has played a central role in your music-making process. What’s the appeal of working with tape for you?
“Depends on what I’m aiming for, because the sound of tape can be a wide spectrum of choice, e.g. ¼” tape running at 15 inches per second on my Nagra is very clean, compared to a dictaphone or a cassette recorder. For the warbly saturated tape sound I’ve used cassette and microcassette a lot over the years, as well as reel-to-reel at different speeds.
“In more recent years if I've wanted a warbly saturated sound I often use a tape echo: by sending a stem from Logic through the tape echo but with the repeats turned to 0, I can then take the off-tape output back into Logic and realign it so it’s in sync with the project. The great thing about using a tape echo for this is that they usually have a speed control, such as on Roland Space Echo machines. The speed control can be manipulated in real time to make pitch bends, or you can simply use it as an interesting tone control, as slower speeds will have a narrower bandwidth and sound darker and more warbly, and faster speeds have a wider bandwidth and are a bit cleaner, so you can 'tune in' the right amount of tapey-ness.
“But to answer your question - the appeal is that it makes it more impressionistic, less like reality, more dreamlike and in some cases - more emotional. I think certain instruments just sound gorgeous on tape, especially guitar, piano and flute.”
There’s an instantly recognisable quality to the guitars in your recordings. What do you think it is that contributes to that?
“I have a lot of guitars, so it’s definitely not a specific guitar that gives me the recognisable sound you mentioned, it’s a combination of things, and one of those of course is the way I play. It might sound obvious, but a lot of the tone comes from the fingers and the fingernails and the way you use them. Then I suppose it’s selecting guitars you think have a nice tone, which is a matter of taste. I generally prefer older strings on acoustics, I don’t like recording them when the strings are too fresh and metallic sounding.
"For electric guitars, the amps are really important; it’s a huge percentage of the sound. I mostly use two Audio Kitchen Little Choppers into two 2 x 12 Zilla cabs"
“For electric guitars the amps are really important; it’s a huge percentage of the sound, I mostly use two Audio Kitchen Little Choppers into two 2 x 12 Zilla cabs, which I run in stereo and mic up with two AEA R44CE ribbon mics. But this amp set-up is what I’ve been using for the past 10 years or so, I went through various amps before these.
“Ambivalence Avenue, for example, was a single Fender Blues Jr and an 80s Hofner archtop, a Fender Jaguar and a Squier P Bass (which I still have and use). So I always try to get a sound I like with whatever I’ve got, and I guess it tends to sound like me because it comes down to my tastes and how I want my guitars to sound. Tone is very important to me, and I’m still learning, refining and expanding on what I like about guitars and guitar tone.”
Can you talk us through the recording techniques used on early albums like Fi and Hand Cranked?
“The secret sampler I mentioned was key, and the secret delay pedal was used on Poplar Avenue. Microcassette was used a fair bit on Fi, and I didn’t have any synths back then so the synth tracks were made in SuperCollider 2, which was a text-based programming language for sound synthesis and processing. I made some patches that generated strings of notes that could be manipulated to some degree with the mouse pointer. They sounded too clean for the general vibe of the album, so they were transferred to cassette or microcassette.
“Hand Cranked was homing in more on the mechanical toy vibe, and the early looped tracks I made when I got my first sampler reminded me of mechanical toys, partly because of the lack of quantisation and the lo-fi sound I discovered was so full of imperfections, they made me think of wind-up music boxes and fairground organs, so the sampler got used a lot on Hand Cranked. I remember transferring tracks from the computer to cassette and back to the computer and back onto cassette lots of times to exaggerate the tape sound, making multiple generations like a bad VHS pirate copy.”
You mentioned in an interview with Rupert Neve Designs that the music that paid for your 5088 console was mixed on a “£150 desk in a tiny bedroom”. Was this Lover’s Carvings? Could you talk us through the set-up you were working with back then?
“Yes, that track has been good to me. [laughs] It has been used in TV, film and advertising a lot, which boosted its popularity. In 2003 I finished university and moved out of London back to my girlfriend’s parents’ house in Wolverhampton, they had a small spare bedroom which I took over with a few bits of kit. I had a £150 Behringer mixer, an iMac, and whenever I earned any money from music - which was very little back then - I’d buy a new piece of kit. I also worked part time in a pub and later as a lecturer at Stafford College.
"I had a £150 Behringer mixer, an iMac, and whenever I earned any money from music - which was very little back then - I’d buy a new piece of kit"
“Eventually I had a few guitars, a bass, a Yamaha CS-10, a few mics, an MPC, and various tape machines. I made most of the album Ambivalence Avenue in that room. It was a long time ago, so I can’t remember it too well, but Lovers’ Carvings started out as two separate songs. It was all recorded with a 1988 Hofner archtop, which I purchased for £350 from a second hand music shop in Wolverhampton, the amp was a Fender Blues Jr. I had a Drawmer Tubestation 2 compressor around that time, I used to put stems and mixes through it multiple times as it got grainier and grainier with each generation - that compressor was definitely part of my sound back then.”
You’ve talked before about a relationship between lo-fi recording techniques, dreams and memory. Could you elaborate on that connection and how it figures in your own work?
“When you take the edge off things, when you lose some of the detail, they start to resemble dreams. This is true of pictures as well as sounds. Dreams and memories are massively incomplete, they are like vignettes or very faded images, or like you’re looking through a glass bottle. The detail that we observe in the present moment is not available to us in dreams and memories, so a pristine and wide-bandwidth recording of something feels more real, whereas a lo-fi recording (or photograph) that has blurred edges, smeared details, faded colour or covered in grain, is less like reality, and that can be a very powerful thing.
“Of course, painters like Monet were experimenting with this with painting techniques, and I often find myself wishing my photographs were more like a Monet painting. I think an equivalent exists in audio too - certain artifacts in recording have similar qualities, as they can smudge the subject that’s been recorded, so you’re left with more of an impression of it, rather than something that is very true to life. I’m fascinated with this, but I think high fidelity has its place too, and since Ambivalence Avenue I’ve been trying to somehow merge both worlds.”
You’ve also spoken about wanting to “fuse lo-fi and hi-fi” in your music, balancing the warmth and character of lo-fi music with the clarity of professional recording. How do you bring these worlds together?
“Yes, those are the two worlds I’ve been trying to merge. There are different approaches to this. One is just like people have been doing for decades; going back to Portishead for example, they were combining lush, warm, filmic and grainy samples with crisp, heavy drum sounds and intimate and clear vocals, so it’s not like the whole sound is lo-fi; there are elements of lo-fi in there, but the overall sound is also weighty and punchy and cinematic. But it’s a case of making that range of fidelities work together, sometimes they can juxtapose nicely, other times they can clash.
"What I try to do is make sure the more polished parts still have some of the texture and reality taken off, but retain a certain amount of sharpness and weight"
“I suppose what I try to do is make sure the more polished parts still have some of the texture and reality taken off, but retain a certain amount of sharpness and weight. It’s why I generally use ribbon mics, because they tend to roll off that very top 'air' band, which can be a bit ugly, or a bit too hyper-real. It’s not like they’re lo-fi sounding, it’s more that they sound flattering and less like a forensic microscope for the voice.”
Could you pick out three instruments from your studio you’d keep if you had to get rid of absolutely everything else and tell us why?
“Oof, that’s a tricky one. It’d have to be an electric guitar, bass guitar and an acoustic guitar. Obviously I’d need something to record onto, but as long as I have a computer and those three instruments, then I can make music. As for specific guitars - Martin D18 for the acoustic, maybe a Fender Telecaster and a Fender Jazz Bass.”
How about three pieces of gear?
“Well it’d have to be one of my secret delay pedals, my Nagra IV-S, and if a microphone is a given - an Akai MPC 2500. The delay pedals are crucial to certain types of music I make, both compositionally and tonally, and I need tape - the Nagra can do three speeds so it can do very clean down to not so clean. I haven’t used my MPC a lot in recent years, and partly because it’s in an awkward space in my studio, when I build my next studio I’m going to try and make it more central again, as using an MPC in the past has really let my creativity flow.”
How often are you experimenting with new gear and instruments? Is there anything on your wish-list at the moment?
“As I mentioned before, I’ve been selling gear and I’ve been laying off purchasing gear for the last year or so. This was mostly triggered by preparing to move to Wales. I wanted to lighten the load and use it as an opportunity to rethink what I actually use and need. Maybe if I have enough space at my next studio, I might get an EMT stereo plate reverb. One thing I am going to purchase after the move is a harp, I'm really looking forward to using it with the delay pedals in the same way I've been using piano on Phantom Brickworks tracks. I’m most excited about that to be honest!”
You said in an interview with The Creative Independent: “You’ve got to choose your way of learning. For me, it’s always been this hybrid approach of music and production as one.” Writing music and producing music are often painted as two separate disciplines. Could you elaborate on this idea that for you, they’re part of the same practice?
“I think for a lot of people now they are merged into one. Electronic music, for example, is really a combination of music composition and music production, and a lot of modern music is electronic to some extent. For decades there's been an expectation on new music that, not only will it be musically different, but it will have new sounds and have evolved sonically or in terms of fidelity.
“Obviously the quest for clarity and loudness can only go so far, so I think that's partly what brings about this desire to include elements of the past, whether it's sampling and repurposing old records or whether it's incorporating vintage recording gear and techniques - sounds of the past seem to become more exotic in a new light; for me, nostalgia is a modern perspective. It’s about how the past looks and sounds from where we are now, it’s not about going back to that time.
"A lot of good music is being made by people who aren't musicians in the traditional sense, but they have a good musical ear and imagination"
“A lot of good music is being made by people who aren't musicians in the traditional sense, but they have a good musical ear and imagination and general feel for music and sound, so if they can make good music with a computer - then that makes them a musician in my books, not just a producer. Traditionally the producer was someone who took a musician or band's songs and thought of a way to develop them into a record, similar to how a director might take a story or a book and dream up a way of developing it into pictures.
“But now we are decades into the age of the bedroom producer and technology has empowered those who might not have had a chance at making it the traditional way - e.g. having made a convincing demo, impressed a record label boss who will then pay for you to go and make an album. It's the opposite now, you get signed to a label because you've made an album. That's how it was for me when I signed to Warp!”
Listening back to a track like Cherry Blossom Road, I was struck by a resemblance to some of the new Phantom Brickworks material; in a sense you’ve come full circle, but experimented with so many different sounds in the process. Musically, what would you like to explore that you haven’t yet tried?
“The last track on Fi, Poplar Avenue, was made with the same delay pedal and technique as I use for Phantom Brickworks, to me it’s a gift that keeps on giving. As well as getting a harp, I'd like to work with church organs and MIDI-controllable fairground organs. I also would like to experiment with recording instruments and sounds over vast distances, like playing drones through a big guitar amp in a quarry and recording it from a mile away.”
