Bibio ‘Silver Wilkinson’
I don't usually have a preconceived theme for an album before I start making one, to do so would perhaps feel like a restriction further down the line, one that might inhibit natural creative flow and get in the way of new ideas. Restriction is quite different to limitation though, limitations can of course tease out creativity, like how the limitations of a haiku or a limited palette of colours can force you to be more mindful and selective. If there was a preconceived idea before this album started coming together, it was a fairly vague one: to focus more on an organic and live sound and to record more guitar and other live instrumentation. However, I'm no purist, so I don't restrain myself from taking stylistic diversions, to do so might be to dispose of the unplanned. As a result this album feels to me as eclectic as my previous two albums. There is a certain 'let nature take its course' attitude with my approach to making an album, this is because I know discoveries can often be more rewarding than stringently directing even the grandest of ideas. After working long and hard on an album, however, I crave change… like you might crave spring after winter. I love seasonal change, it affects me a lot. I like the idea of comparing albums to seasons - they stand alone yet are part of a bigger story. They complement each other. So this album, to an extent, started out with the desire for a new 'season', contrasting somewhat with the previous.
Although the majority of my tracks get started and finished in my studio, I occasionally take things outside where I've found the process and the result to be refreshing. The recording of 'À tout à l'heure' started out in my garden on a gorgeous sunny day when it felt morally wrong to be hidden away indoors. I still had the urge to make music so I limited myself to a few bits of gear and set up in my garden: a 12 string guitar, an MPC sampler, a microphone and a cassette recorder. I drummed on objects in the garden, like a plastic watering can, I 'snipped' garden shears for percussion parts. The guitar part was something I had been developing over some time in my head but it was this change of environment that led to recording the backbone of this song, which I then continued to build upon in my studio later. When I listen to the intro of 'À tout à l'heure' now, I still hear the sunshine and the garden in it because for me it's like a photograph of that moment. No doubt the sunny outdoors inspired the lyrics too.
With the song 'Dye The Water Green' (my personal favourite off the album) I remember going into my brick-wall shed in the garden for a change of scenery and to capture the sound of rain on the tin roof, I remember recording additional musical ideas around a guitar riff I had previously come up with, capturing them on an old ghetto blaster. I remember feeling at the time that I wouldn't have come up with the same things if I was in my studio. I think putting yourself in different environments affects how you feel and act and essentially can lead to more variety.
Way before writing the lyrics for 'Dye The Water Green', it existed as this murky and melancholy instrumental, simply called 'Brick shed with a tin roof'. Then impressionistic images started coming into my mind when I listened back to it… it sounded murky green, like it was under the surface of a river or stream. I like to paint scenes with music and words, blending reality with metaphors, deliberately being ambiguous or cryptic... for me this ignites the imagination more, rather than dry, clear and easily decipherable lyrics. Lyrics often come out just as arbitrary sentences that fit nicely to the music but then I'll try to find a way to branch out from those arbitrary sentences with more meaning - watching an unplanned theme unfold before me. Other times I have more of a definite 'story' in my mind, usually suggested to me by the atmosphere of the music - I listen in images or 'scenes' a lot of the time, like I'm watching a less than vivid dream captured on film. Lyric writing is often quite an inside-out process though. This was true for 'À tout à l'heure', I had an instrumental version of it playing in the kitchen and I was doing the usual humming of nonsensical words to find vocal melodies… then all of a sudden I started to sing "À tout à l'heure, à tout à l'heure" because I liked the way it worked rhythmically (and I think I had recently returned from France so the phrase was fresh in my mind). I then started to think about the meaning of this phrase and it led me to a specific concept inspired by a Walt Whitman passage. The remainder of the lyrics were a mixture of this concept, off the cuff images and personal memories. The song is more about being in the body than the head, which is quite rare for me.
If music is a language then the guitar is like my mother tongue as a musician, although it wasn't my first instrument. I don't think of this album as a guitar album though. In parts it's more multi-timbral and denser than many things I've done before. It is true for me however that many melodic and rhythmical ideas originate from the guitar.
As for the sound of this album, I strived for a more panoramic filmic sound as well as trying to fuse the warm fuzziness of my older tape saturated work with a bigger and bolder overall sound. It's a combination of what I already knew and what I wanted to achieve, a mixture of years of experience and an exploration of new ground. At first I thought the making of this album might turn into a mini-renaissance for me as I was revisiting some older techniques and aesthetics but then it inevitably ended up being something new and having an identity of its own, having facets that felt new to me. In a sense this album feels way more self sufficient than previous albums. I don't claim to be an island but when I look back over the last few years and consider the records I've obsessed over, it's hard to see how this new album might have been influenced by them, there might be the odd idea here and there influenced by a small component of something I've heard but I really can't put my finger on where the majority of it has come from - it really feels like it's come from within this time around. I do know however that some of the lyrics of the last song "You won't remember…" were influenced by a particular scene in a film… but if that connection is remotely detectable, I'd rather the listener discovers that for themselves. Meaning within music is better discovered than disclosed I think. The same goes for the album title 'Silver Wilkinson', it has a kind of triple meaning, one of which is more available, the others are more cryptic. But I will say that none of them have anything to do with ageing or grey hair :)
This album maybe feels more personal in some ways because I shut myself off more during the making of it, which is easy to do considering where I live, tucked away in a quiet west midlands suburb. There's very little to do where I live but as an artist I like being away from it all, I like to be in my own world when making music and art and not feel a part of any scene or movement. I'm not a city person… only in very small doses. I prefer peace and quiet and I'm glad to be away from so many distractions, it enables me to daydream more. I also didn't really share my work in progress with other people as much I have done in the past, instead I chose to play new tracks to people in their company when being sociable rather than sending out attached music in emails, the latter being a bit clinical and puts people in the spotlight as far as feedback is concerned.
I spend a lot of time listening back to what I'm working on, listening to early mixes either in my living room or my kitchen… or sometimes on a walk or in bed, imagining what parts need to come next or just getting ideas for lyrics - this is very important to me. I often lie in bed in the morning for 2 hours just thinking in silence, sometimes with my music playing… I often find this window is the best time for letting ideas flow and then acting upon ideas later in the day feels natural to me. I know if I didn't spend so much time listening and thinking, this album would sound very different.
Stephen Wilkinson
March 2013
