The closing and 10th track off Bibio’s Sleep on the Wing, “Watching Thus, The Heron Is All Pool”, is arguably the new record’s finest moment. Like some of the tracks on Ribbons, from 2019, the song wraps itself in the adornments of mid-20th century British folk – the acoustic guitar and accompanying strings do magical little flights of fancy – and Stephen Wilkinson imbues the music with a wondrous pastoral quality. The piece runs less than three minutes without so much as a reprise, the bridges forever lurching forward toward the horizon line, kind of like Nick Drake covering a song off Clogs’ The Creatures in the Garden of Lady Walton.

Wilkinson hasn’t always been fixated on such modes of effusive beauty. Though he can wax chameleonic like the best of them, most of his work of note – I’m thinking prominently of 2009’s excellent Ambivalence Avenue – has mixed folksy, finger-picked ruminations a la Fahey or Kottke with found sounds, avant-garde construction and the more conventional trappings of electronica and IDM. In short, he’s best, maybe most transfixing, when he’s mixing colors, not painting portraits. When I listened to Bibio’s debut, Fi, some 15 years ago, I was enthralled by its mix of high-minded academic thinking with recording methods and presentation that framed themselves as more decidedly lo-fi. (Wilkinson, for what it’s worth, studied sonic arts at Middlesex University in London.) In this, he seemed a student both of Jim O’Rourke and Lou Barlow – an enticing conceit.