Bibio and Olivier St. Louis to release new The Serious EP

"Why So Serious?" appeared on Bibio's recent long-player A Mineral Love

Speaking about the release, Bibio says:

"I first heard Olivier’s distinctive and incredible voice on Hudson Mohawke’s excellent Warp debut Butter. Some years passed and I was working on tracks that I thought would suit someone like Olivier. I had a brief chat with Ross (HudMo) saying I wanted to work with a singer with amazing falsetto and he recommended Olivier. Ross put us in touch and I sent Olivier a bunch of instrumentals that were in need of vocals. He very quickly sent tracks back to me, which were really impressive.

"We built up a friendship over WhatsApp (me being in England and Olivier living in Berlin), and discovered we had some fundamental interests in common - guitars, watches and shoes. We eventually met up in Birmingham city centre some months later when he was over visiting family and friends. He then came over to my cottage for dinner, walks in the countryside and to check out my collection of guitars, it was more of a social visit so we didn’t get anything recorded then. Our collaboration via email was so natural that I wanted to do more with Olivier and the feeling seemed mutual. Collaborating over long distance works well for both of us as we’re both one-man-bands and both produce our own music. Olivier is very prolific and very fast at laying down effortlessly strong vocal lines, not only that but he’s a much quicker lyricist-on-demand than myself!

"All the lyrics on this EP were written by him. In the case of 'Night Falls', this was actually the very first vocal he sent me, it was originally written for an alternative instrumental version of the track ‘A Mineral Love’, but the original version of A Mineral Love went on the album, so we were left with the vocals to ‘Night Falls’. I didn’t want to waste such great vocals and such a great song, so I created an entirely new instrumental around Olivier’s acapella and we were both really happy with the result. I expect we will be doing more and more together in future."

The Serious EP is out via Warp on 2 September.

Have a listen to a sampler below.