Past and present rumination haunts Bibio's Phantom Brickworks (LPII)

That release, with its swirling washes of sound, recalled certain Gas records of the 1990s, such as Zauberberg and Königsforst, originally issued on the much-lamented Mille Plateaux label and later resurrected on Kompakt in 2008. There was also the ghost of William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops hovering as a guiding spirit.

This new double vinyl essays similar territory to the first geographically, with its evocations of spectral settings in rural abandonment or industrial ruin, and musically with piano, guitar, as well as interspersed voices that are suggestive at times of medieval sacred sonics.

It could all easily have congealed into a soup of atmospheric overload, but Bibio gives each track a clearer sense of definition than was arguably the case seven years ago, and it is the glinting details here that compel attention. The sharp piano notes that stab out from the rhythmic pattern in the track “Phantom Brickworks VI” force the listener to appreciate the carefully-considered construction of the piece, such that what comes across is much more than ambience.

The loop effects throughout the album are delightfully subtle and unpredictable. Certainly, there is pattern, but there is nuance in the shifts, as sounds ease in and out creating a simultaneously unsettling and rewarding imbalance as in “Llyn Peris”, named after a lake in Caernarfon, on the edge of which is a ruined thirteenth century tower.

It’s this creative tension between the spiky and the somnolent that hints at something akin to the hauntological, in the sense so well conveyed by the late Mark Fisher, especially in his wondrous book Ghost of My Life. Bibio manages to conjure aspects of locations that are clearly of the past, but whose lingering presence summons up a spirit of inquiry about the here and now, and also about a future once imagined but long since cast aside from serious contemplation.

The brickworks, in their physical and economic solidity, stood for the communities they employed, for strength and also for physical and concomitant mental wellbeing; for tightly-bound security; for inter-generational cohesiveness. Now, they and the music they inspire here represent loss, the mournful vocal tones on “Tegid’s Court” eloquent in their wordlessness, and on tracks such as “Brograve” suggestive (like Basinski’s masterwork) of decay, but also of the illusory prospect of a permanence that was only to crumble in more recent years, the skittery piano evoking unfulfilled days of futures past.

An album of melancholia, of beauty in ruins, this record tells us much about the fading of places in which what was important was held to be determined by values rather than by costs. Yet it also might invite us to be wary, in our own time, of what certain ghoulish public figures might deceitfully present to its dispirited denizens, pretending to offer a restoration of a mythical golden glow from the depths of a foggy gloom.