this just came our way and we like it. a full review will run next week. In the meantime you can get a further taste of the album, “Ambivalance Avenue’, over at the Warp site.
We asked Bibio for a few words and this is what he had to say;
There’s a magic window of consciousness between sleep and waking. I’m only speaking from personal experience here. In this transient stage, there sometimes seems to be a moment of clarity. It’s as if the logical organising left hemisphere of the brain is sleeping, or has not fully come online, although this moment is not necessarily wordless. I’ve had numerous experiences recently where I’ve woken up from an afternoon nap and I’m listening to music that I put on before I drifted off. I’ve woken to this glorious musical concoction and it’s as if I’m hearing it without barriers, with a childlike mind but with the added observant and experienced nature of a mature mind. It lasts a few seconds and then ‘reality’ creeps in, the usual feeling or perspective of reality, whatever that is at the time. But being in that magic window feels blissful and divine. Even more wonderful still, I’ve entered this magic window looking at my girlfriend, and in a flash I’ve considered the transient nature of life, I’ve considered death, and above all a kind of peek behind a mask of Brahma. I’ve considered, and felt, that this miraculous sight before me is the universe playing this part, and it’s also ‘playing’ me and my consideration of itself. Like a cloud of glittery dust forming the most unfathomable vast ball of wonder and within it is an aperture, or millions of apertures, and the universe views itself through these, and the apertures are elevated by what they see, and elevated by considering itself. It’s like a feedback of wonder. We are those apertures. As a kid I used to sometimes think far out, out into the universe, out into infinity and nebulae and galaxies, trying to freak myself out with the question “who am I to know of this?” Nowadays I don’t need to wander out to those nebulae, I can just walk into my garden and stare at a plant. I look at its form, it’s beautiful mathematical patterns, and then look at another plant with another form, and the next, and the next. It’s as if the universe is dancing, purposelessly, meaninglessly, and I don’t mean that in a put-down sense. It is an anthropomorphic idea to consider that a plant has a serious purpose, to fight for space, reproduce, survive… but when considering it outside of those scientific observations, it is the universe dancing in form. Plants are particularly symbolic for me, perhaps it’s their calm beautiful patterned forms? Now I find myself staring at my cat Arnie. I watch him licking his paw and consider that he is the beautiful sleek form that he is because of the environment that shaped him. He is an answer to an answer, or a question to a question, and the questions and answers have no words and no end, they are like dancing partners, solid & space, front & back, up & down. All things mutually arise, nothing was put here and nothing was sent here on a mission. We invent our own missions and we get tangled in them. We weave a veil to the divine out of self-flattery and in the exercising of our intellects and flexing our egos, or out of fear. But all of those things are a part of this world too, as real as minerals and raindrops, they needn’t cease to exist. But I urge whoever is willing to consider for once in a while that the way they think is conditioned, and therefore their view of reality, and it is in these quiet moments of meditation that we can get glimpses of the Brahmic splendour, and it’s reassuring.