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Strange sights have been reported from the shores of Llyn Tegid, also known as Lake Bala, the largest freshwater body in Wales. Lights flicker beneath the surface of the water, and stone spires rise wraithlike from the murky depths—remnants, according to legend, of the castle of Tegid Foel, a wicked ruler whose kingdom was flooded as punishment from the gods. Those who know the folktale will recognize elements of the myth in “Tegid’s Court,” a melancholy highlight of Bibio’s PHANTOM BRICKWORKS (LP II): the harpist who serenaded the court on the night of the king’s fateful final banquet; the birdsong that lured the harpist to higher ground before the floodwaters descended; and faint, mournful voices—the singing of the drowned, perhaps, or a wordless echo of the warning still heard flickering on the wind today: “Vengeance will come!”
Bibio, aka Stephen Wilkinson, has long been interested in recorded sound’s capacity to convey nameless yearning. His best-known music is a gently psychedelic take on folk pop with a layer of nostalgia baked in; the warbly pitches and muted frequencies suggest tapes dredged up from sunken wrecks. (In his commitment to making his music sound eerily like a time-worn relic, he’s a lot like his contemporary Burial, just raised on Nick Drake and Fairport Convention instead of Metalheadz and Renegade Hardware.) The Phantom Brickworks series represents the apotheosis of Wilkinson’s nostalgic inclinations, paying tribute to Britain’s landscapes and ruins—crumbling buildings, villages reclaimed by weeds—in wistful, ambient tone poems.
Like 2017’s first installment of the series, PHANTOM BRICKWORKS (LP II) is an understated affair; it consists of little more than piano, baritone guitar, the occasional voice, and heavy reverb and delay. As on the first album, sketchlike fragments are interspersed with longer, more immersive pieces, but the terrain feels more varied this time around, with more to distinguish one track from the next, whether in terms of timbre, structure, or melody. The aquatic swirl of the opening “Dinorwic,” named for the site of a former slate quarry, recalls the stateliness of Stars of the Lid. The sighing string tones of “Llyn Peris,” named for another lake in Wales, might be an outtake from Aphex Twin’s Selected Analog Works Volume II. The foggy “Brograve,” which shares its title with a dilapidated 18th-century windmill in Norwich, might be one of Philip Jeck’s 13-RPM meditations.
Brian Eno and William Basinski are patron saints of this music—not just because of its suggestively somber mood and grandly elegiac air, but also for the way Bibio’s loops, at their best, seem to suspend time’s forward march. Like a magician practiced in sleight of hand, he keeps your ears focused on one thing—a particularly plaintive melodic phrase, say—while subtly rearranging everything else in the background. But he seems to be playing loops of different loops against one another. You can hear it in the dissolving counterpoints of “Dinorwic,” or the fuzzy palimpsest of “Phantom Brickworks VI,” in which layer after layer of piano gradually fills in the audio sphere until it appears like a winter sky crisscrossed with contrails. The interaction of all these irregular loops has a curious effect, repetitive but always changing. No two bars are exactly alike, but the shifts are so subtle, it’s impossible to say exactly how they differ. And in that unstable matrix, he holds you rapt.
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