published by Ben Hogwood, text taken from the press release.

Bibio has announced the imminent release of Phantom Brickworks (LP II) on Warp Records on 22 November. The first excerpt from the album, DINORWIC, can be heard here:

PHANTOM BRICKWORKS is an ongoing ambient/drone project by English musician and producer Stephen James Wilkinson aka Bibio, inspired by nature, landscape and places haunted by the faint ghosts of industry. It explores the human echoes still present in various sites around Britain which Wilkinson visited, observing their gradual decline.

“Human beings are highly sensitive to the atmospheres of places, which can be enhanced or dramatically altered when you learn the context of their history… echoes and voices can sometimes be heard, in some way or another. Places sometimes have things to say,” says Wilkinson. He continues, “Since releasing ‘PHANTOM BRICKWORKS’ in 2017, I have come to realise that it is an ongoing project. Although elements of ‘PHANTOM BRICKWORKS’ have seeped into my other albums over the years, it feels like its own separate entity.”

PHANTOM BRICKWORKS (LPII) brings attention to new sites; some are intriguing, vast scars on the natural landscape, others survive only in local memories, historic clips and photographs. A few remain submerged from ordinary sight, while some exist purely as legends and stories. Under blankets of improvised evolving loops of piano and baritone guitar, the muffled spectres of working life can be heard, implying nature will come for everything and eventually hide the scars.

“When I announced the first ‘PHANTOM BRICKWORKS’ album, I discussed how places can be charged with meaning, depending on what they’d been through. That observation continues with the new album. It consists of mostly improvised music, using some of the same techniques as before as well as developing new ones that are unique to this album. Some familiar territory is revisited, both musically and in terms of the types of locations that interest me. North Wales plays a significant role, but this album reaches beyond –  extending into the realms of legends, as stories passed down through generations can sometimes haunt a place more vividly,” says Wilkinson.

You can pre-order Bibio’s album here:

Published post no.2,326 – 9 October 2024

published by Ben Hogwood, text taken from the press release. Photo (c) Paul Heartfield

The much-loved band Tunng are returning, celebrating 20 years since their first release. In those two decades they have maintained a fascinating musical balance, with a blend of electronica, folk and leftfield pop that has consistently marked them out as a band of special interest. Now the announcement of a new album in early 2025 comes with the following press release:

“Time flies when you’re being Tunng. Can it really be over two decades since the band’s genre-blurring, self-styled ‘pagan folktronica’ first emerged from an east London studio. It surely can, and what’s more, January 2025 will mark the twentieth anniversary of This is Tunng…Mother’s Daughter and Other Songs, a debut longplayer whose acoustic guitars and poetic disquisitions on nature, mythology and the human condition, courtesy of Sam Genders, sieved through fellow band founder Mike Lindsay’s lattice of fractured beats and crackling electronics, still sounds like an impiously postmodern wedding of the rustic and the synthetic, the arcane and the futurist.

That 20-year-old signature sound makes a warm return on Tunng’s eighth studio album, Love You All Over Again, a winning amalgam of texture and melody, disconcerting imagery and shapeshifting production, predicated, Lindsay reveals, on a conscious reacquainting with the band’s first principles. “I went back to the first two albums just to listen to how we fused genres – things like Davy Graham, Pentangle, the Expanding Records catalogue and the Wicker Man soundtrack. Over the years, Tunng’s sound has varied and twisted, but at the root there is always a flavour of what Sam and I made on that first album. Rather than searching for a new avenue we went back to what we used to do, which, after all this time, felt like it was a new avenue… Love You All Over Again is our way of coming full circle.”

Lead single Didn’t Know Why, which you can watch above, is a dauntless face-off between metallic synths and pellucid guitar arpeggiation with lyrics about a familiar Tunng song character, Jenny. “It’s very Tunng: dark but then warm and melancholic. Sam heard this and immediately brought back the murderous Jenny, who has appeared on two previous Tunng albums”.  Genders offers his take on Jenny. “She once represented a kind of romantic ideal – ‘the one’ – but now she’s a sort of every-person – a kind of archetype of all of us!”

Love You All Over Again is an album that gets to the very essence of Tunng. “For Tunng to work, it has to feel surprising, odd and unpredictable, and the new album has all that. It’s all about Tunng being back, as a family, within our original boundaries, bringing the love to all who have been a part of our journey over 20 years.”  Lindsay sums up nicely.

Published post no.2,325 – 8 October 2024