As Stephen James Wilkinson explains in the documentation accompanying Mind Bokeh, Bibio’s 3rd longer form release for Warp in the space of just 2 years, “Bokeh is the out of focus region of a photograph. It’s not a quantifiable thing. In Japanese it means ‘haze’, ‘blur’ or even ‘dementia’.” Which means two things. Firstly, that Wilkinson has given as good a summary of the album as I could think of and that, secondly, he obviously has particular æsthetic goals for the work which he has succeeded in achieving.
Mind Bokeh does seem to avoid focus across its 12 track sprawl. This is a feature for which Wilkinson has been criticised but I don’t see much point in applying it. Bibio is as post-modern an artist as anyone and diversity is a large part of the whole point. So I’m happy to let Wilkinson lead me up any number of garden paths. Even within tracks, things stop and restart somewhere completely different. ‘Pretentious’ spends most of its 6 minutes as lo-fi glitch r’n’b, only for a coda of unrelated cheap 80s synthetics heard through a smoke haze to appear. The following ‘Anything New’ heads back to cut’n’paste r’n’b territory, this time with sunny late 60s/early 70s overtones. Wilkinson’s vocals amidst all this remain determinably indie, a white boy aware that he’d just sound stupid trying any sort of overt vocal gymnastics. What a pleasing relief.
Perhaps the ‘bokeh’ is also a reference to that light summery sound. Current single ‘K Is For Kelson’ is almost throwaway in some of its timbres – wobbly synth riffs, approximated steel drums and bottle percussion – but the noise blast interludes and propulsive rhythmic foundation stop if being twee. Other types of summers are also evoked. ‘Take Off Your Shirt’s starts out like a karaoke remake of Courtney Love aping her 70s rock heroes. If that sounds like a criticism, it actually isn’t – the degrees of separation have Bibio inhabiting his own, enjoyable territory.
Some moments are a bit throwaway – ‘Light Seep’ with its paint-by-numbers funk guitar samples and cosmic-cliché synth noodles without any real purpose or goal, for example. But pieces like the title track show aimless noodling as a positive force, with its wheezy, tape-wobbling synths building an atmosphere that floats somewhere between lullaby and horror-show. Likewise, ‘Saint Christopher’ aims for atmosphere, closing the album with sounds sanded back to create a feeling of light revelry, without actually being so itself, its lo-fi leanings a metaphor for difficulty rather than the straight up breeze the track might have otherwise been.
If I could throw out one reference which might seem a bit obtuse on the surface, Mind Bokeh actually reminds me of Ween. With his ability to appropriate ranges of historical and contemporary styles, Wilkinson brings to mind Gene and Dean’s ability to float into any desired territory yet make it their own. Bibio comes off as a whole lot more earnest, his post-modernism seemingly more hauntological than critical. Either way, Mind Bokeh is a worthy addition to the Bibio back catalogue, which is itself becoming a formidable body of work. And while there is always the nagging thought that Bibio’s music is so quintessentially ‘now’ that it might date poorly and become, in the future, a hermetically sealed symbol of early 21st century advanced bedroom laptoppery, it does, for the moment, deliver intrigue and enjoyment.
Adrian Elmer
