Bibio - Vignetting The Compost (2020/2009)

Another album of rose-tinted nostalgia from Bibio, who've made a remarkably fertile career out of making the kind of music you'd hear buried at the bottom of Boards Of Canada records. The price they pay for their art is forever being condemned to reviews starting out exactly as this one has, making associations with the faded, gauzy super-8 sounds of those classic BOC sounds. No one can pull it off with quite as much vintage authenticity as Bibio though - perhaps not even the Brothers Sandison themselves, who admittedly do tend to cast their sonic driftnet a little wider than the kind of blurry, colour-saturated textures you'll find on Vignetting The Compost. Bibio's music makes for an interesting phenomenon in that it's so clearly tapping into a thread of nostalgia that's based on pure fantasy. Never have old cassette or tape recordings sounded quite so rich and riddled with curiously musical distortions and warping effects as found here. What Bibio do is the equivalent of a child tea-staining a homemade treasure map and then browning the edges in an oven. This is a stylised fantasy music of the past that's probably a more sonically enchanting prospect than just about anything you'd be fortunate enough to haphazardly dig out of an attic. The trebly, melodious crackle of 'Under The Pier' warbles and warps its way through chord loops and field recordings sounding like a cross between a Philip Jeck composition and a '70s seaside home movie, while the likes of 'Weekend Wildfire' take a more fulsome, musically ambitious form, combining perky acoustic guitar figures with aged strands of synthesizer, and of course that trademark compressed analog-style mixdown. Lovely, as ever.