Bibio & Dorian Concept :: Answers
Electronica and folk by correspondence: two friends, one shared folder.
Answers was made without a shared room. Files, video clips and WhatsApp messages travelled between Vienna, Wolverhampton and rural Wales, and almost every track still carries the mark of someone who listened, changed something and sent it back.
The title should be taken literally. Stephen Wilkinson and Oliver Johnson met in 2009, the year Bibio arrived on Warp with Ambivalence Avenue and Johnson debuted with When Planets Explode, after videos of his microKORG improvisations, filmed while he was studying multimedia art in Salzburg, had already done the rounds online. For more than a decade they traded shows, remixes and one track, “An Unopened Letter”, which closes Miniatures. The joint record, though, began with an image: Wilkinson saw the video for “Let It All Go” and wrote to Johnson proposing an audiovisual project. What followed was a shared folder, emails, chats, and a method Warp itself sums up in three verbs: listening, altering, answering.
Sometimes you can hear the exact point of handover. “Lichen Trip” takes its name from its triplet gait: Wilkinson’s guitar turns with the cyclical patience of folk, while Johnson’s Roland SH-101 arrives already routed through an Eventide Orville, a rack harmonizer from the early 2000s. Two generations of machines, a monophonic analogue synth from 1982 and a digital processor built to shift pitch, contend for two minutes and forty-four seconds, and the synth phrases carry the breath of a brass player.
“Pearl Net”, over in a minute and a quarter, is one of the rare moments when the sound thickens and looms, laid out across ambient textures. In “Shame” the synth pattern climbs and descends the scale while staying close to home, then the ending lets in rain and wind chimes, both of them synthetic.
In “Pins & Needles” Wilkinson’s guitar leaves such a recognisable imprint that the track struggles to break away from its climate, that warmth of fingers on strings and tape Bibio has been carrying with him for twenty years. Johnson stays inside the piece, yet every one of his interventions adds something finely made: here he spreads a library music colour, soaked in folktronica. Then the tail is sucked into a fault, a machine losing charge and dragging the harmony down with it. It happens elsewhere too: when the balance tips, it tips towards Bibio.
The VHS-C and MiniDV cameras used for the five videos, the circuit-bent mixers, the figure in the red jacket repeated inside ever smaller frames: it is a vocabulary both men know by heart, and one Warp’s audience recognises from the first frame. Recognising it is not the same as being tired of it, and for this writer at least that vocabulary keeps its grip intact. Bibio’s guitar yields ground to the synthesizers without disappearing, and the keyboards of Dorian Concept, who on Miniatures set down compositions in single takes, here agree to be cut, reassembled, sent back.
What remains is a quality uncommon on a record signed by two producers used to working alone: neither takes up all the space for long. The formula works best when the synthesizers settle into the same frequencies as the guitar and the border between the two sources is lost. Wilkinson plays an amplified semi-acoustic run through effects, and its register becomes common ground: Johnson seems to seek out exactly those zones, until at times he builds a pastoral wood of sounds that balance one another.
The physical edition comes with a six-page concertina booklet, designed entirely by the pair, typography included. Opened on a table it unfolds in jolts, one crease after another, with the same pauses as a conversation conducted through attachments.
