Cyclic Defrost Magazine

Posted: 09 May 2009 02:45 AM PDT

Bibio

West Midlands, UK-based electronic producer Stephen Wilkinson has previously released three albums as Bibio, with his combination of treated electronic drones, field recordings and folk influences calling to mind the similarly pastoral likes of Boards Of Canada. He’s also something of a prolific guy, this latest six track EP (his last release for Mush before signing to Warp) emerging just a couple of months after his preceding third album ‘Vignetting The Compost’. While that aforementioned album showed Wilkinson’s use of folk elements in full evidence however, ‘Ovals & Emeralds’ is a considerably more deconstructed affair. In this case, Wilkinson’s predominant focus is on working with detuned and electronically treated vinyl sources, resulting in a beatless collection of tracks that sound sepia-toned, as if they were beamed in from some other age. Opening track ‘Oval Emerald Vertigo’ offers up a good taste of this approach, sending what sounds like a loop of vintage soul strings rolling against disorienting layers of vinyl drag and delayed-out harmonics, the resulting woozy psychedelic fusion at points calling to mind an ice-cream van slowing down.

By contrast, ‘The Death Of A Trapeze Artist’ sees blurry, phased out piano elements slowly giving way to delicate treated guitar textures and wafting harmonic ambience, before ‘Carosello Elitticco’ sees some of the familiar folk-derived elements returning to the foreground as feathery, plucked acoustic guitar notes spiral against a beatific backdrop of gentle flutes and sampled birdsong, a melodic aesthetic that also spills over into ‘Six String Marenghi’, shortly before things waft out into shimmering synthetic ambience. It’s the seven minute long ‘Polycoulrophon’ that really offers up the strangest trip here, with looped and detuned flute samples gradually accelerating at dizzying speed, only to get sucked down into a black hole of filtering, the resulting eerie ambient wander amidst spooky, dubbed-out textures and spiraling, melodic notes only being broken as proceedings rise back out through a wash of glistening vibraphone melodics. File this one under ‘repeat listening’ – indeed, ‘Ovals & Emeralds’ needs to be given time to reveal its full detail.

Simon Whetham – Understory (Trente Oiseaux)

Posted: 09 May 2009 02:45 AM PDT

Simon Whethams Understory holds a number of listenings: it is a sense of a travel document, the journey into the Brazilian rainforest, arrival is documented, the vista and inhabitants are revealed and the interaction of the technological is brought to an implicit recognition for the listener. The environmental sense of the music: bringing the Amazon into your room, rendering its life immediate and relevant and contextualising its continued existence as an ethical and moral imperative. The sonic sculpture approach to the nature of the record, the manner of the recording and the concepts of music and the disguise of the wrought within the presentation of the natural. All presented without the guise of the naturalist or rainforest sounds 'source' concepts betraying a simple romantic version of the interaction.

Simon Whetham is in a sense curated by a set of guiding principles, along with a kinship with Robin Rimbaud (Scanner) and to a degree that this album is co-created by the Mamori sound project, run by Francisco Lopez. In this reading the album holds a deep ecology both in a sound sense and in terms of its orientation towards content.

"In my work I attempt to bring the listener's attention to sounds not normally noticed. It is easy to miss, or dismiss, beautiful and strange sounds that constantly surround us …we are unable to close our ears, such is the power of sound."

Understory, being that level between the forest floor and the canopy, whether taken as metaphor or direct description, is essentially the attention Simon Whetham draws our ears towards, it will not, to echo the words of Gill Scott Heron, give you sex appeal, but this quiet revolution is definitely alive.

Innerversitysound