Bibio

Musical polymath Bibio is releasing his second EP since last year’s album ‘A Mineral Love’. The EP showcases Bibio’s teenage influences and harks back to his inspirations from mid to late 90s French house. The EP touches upon House, french house and summery upbeat rhythms and features the manipulated vocals of previous collaborator Olivier St. Louis.

Bibio explains: “I got my first sampler in 1998, a pretty lo-fi bit of kit with very limited functions and sampling time. Some of the early tracks I made with this sampler were crude house tracks, inspired at the time by mid to late 90s French house, which I’ve been a fan of since it was a fairly new sound. In fact, I was making house tunes before the name Bibio came into being and before making many of the styles I’m known for today.

Fast forward 18 years and I purchased a Roland TR-808 drum machine. In 2016 I made a bunch of rhythms on the 808, experimenting with the sounds through a ring modulator. I made 4 tracks that were just 808, no other instruments used. I bounced the tracks and put them on my phone so I could listen to them in my house. Initially I enjoyed them as tracks in their own right, but I knew there was definitely something there to build on. Getting the 808 reinforced my desire to make more house music. Some time later I decided to use these drum patterns and develop them further. Close friends of mine who are aware of my history with house music have often said I should release an EP or something of just house tracks, and it’s something I’ve always wanted to do.

So I went back into my studio and went through each of these four 808 rhythm tracks and started to add synths. I then got to a stage where I wanted to add sampled vocals to the tracks, and while I was thinking what vocal acapellas I could use (considering there’s no internet in my studio where I could search for acapellas to sample), I realised I had all of the raw vocal tracks from Olivier St Louis that he sent over for ‘Why So Serious?’ as well as our other collaborations. I wasn’t interested in doing a remix EP, the concept and challenge here was to create brand new tracks and treating Olivier’s vocals as raw material to reshape into something new and different from the original melodies”