Start Listening To: Bibi Club
Montreal duo Bibi Club return with Amaro, a tactile and transcendent exploration of love, loss and the space between worlds.
For those unfamiliar with your music, can you tell us who you are, where you’re from and about the music you make?
We're Adèle and Nico from Montreal, Canada. With our music, we explore the liminal spectrum between the here and the beyond, pointing to love, nature and community as the unifying purpose.
What themes or emotions do you explore in your upcoming album Amaro?
With Amaro, we are exploring grief as a main theme, fatality, in contrast to the desire to love and to live.
Can you share any specific artistic influences that shaped Amaro's sound or lyrical content during its creation process?
With Amaro we wanted to push our limit, we wanted to be radical with our aesthetic choices. We always say that the sound on the album tastes like dirt, you can feel the music in your body. We imagine people listening to the album while dancing their emotions to the extreme in ancient ruins. We were influenced by les Tapisseries de l'Apocalypse in the Angers castle in France, the medieval imagery influenced the sounds and the lyrical content.
How did your collaborations with Helena Deland and Dimitri Milbrun impact the overall vibe and direction of your new album?
Helena is reciting a text on a song called A different light. The song is an homage to a friend we lost last year. Helena makes the song larger than us. She is reciting a text that Adèle sings later on the album in french. The text is inspired by les Tapisseries de l'Apocalypse, it seems coherent with the times we are living in. As for Dimitri, he plays a sax solo on our song George Sand, he represents the desire to love and live, the sparks of life that gets us inspired and alive.
What does the title track 'Amaro' represent for you both, and how does it set the tone for the rest of the album?
Amaro to us is a character, a feeling, a place between life and death. It's like a character that passes across the album, an immortal figure, a place where we live our grief. It sets the tone in the sounds we use for the album: the guitar that has a grit, like dirt, the pulse of the drum machine, the feeling of emergency with a calming voice, almost like a spell. It exposes the lyrical themes of the album: life, death, nature.
Can you describe the visual aesthetic for the Amaro album artwork and how it complements the music?
The artwork for Amaro is a collection of ink illustrations made by the visual artist Mégane Voghell and assembled by graphic designer Hugo Jeanson. The illustrations are based on the songs' themes and characters, the mother and the child, the angry beast, Amaro, etc. It presents itself like a window on the world of Amaro, giving the album a feeling of a fable, a myth.
How has your approach to live performances evolved since your earlier shows, particularly in light of your recent experiences?
The live experience is crucial to our project. It's a way to communicate with our audience, to create a human connection, to transcend everyday life. We have been working lately with a lighting designer/video artist (Flavie Lemée), to create mood and textures that pushes the music in a spiritual experience, a meaningful experience. We also work closely with our sound engineer (Charles-David Dubé) to make sure the music and vocals have a physical impact on the crowd. We want to make the crowd feel something, bring an experience that makes you go back home after the show and feel more human, more empathic to the others.
What do you hope audiences take away from your performances on the upcoming UK tour, especially after hearing the new material?
We hope they feel a human connection and they come back home with more empathy and a feeling of community. The new material is raw and has a sense of urgency, a tension, but it also points to something luminous and hopeful.
What is one aspect of your songwriting process that you find particularly challenging, and how do you navigate that?
Our songwriting process is really instinctive, we tend to move fast and not overwork what feels right. So we don't often feel challenged by it. But once in a while something feels good musically but a little off, we have a feeling that it's worth pursing but it's not as instinctive then usual, so the challenge is to find the balance between not overworking but also not letting go a good idea.
What role does your community play in your creative process, and how has it influenced your music in recent years?
We are lucky to have a nice musical community around us and supportive friends. Their projects influence us to go further, to push our limits, to keep exploring new creative territories. We work with two managers, and they have amazing musical taste, they are helpful in our creative process to help us validate our ideas but also to defend them.
What do you love right now?
Adèle: I love spending time with friends, it nourishes me. I also love the fall and the complex feeling it brings. It is darker.The sun is low in the sky but yet so very bright.
Nico: I love gardening and I love the bands Moin and Milkweed that I both discovered recently.
What do you hate right now?
Adèle : I hate dirty opportunism. When people crush others to go higher.
Nico: I hate how the canadian medias have been covering the genocide in Palestine, and I hate the constant violence.
Name an album you’re still listening to from when you were younger and why it’s still important to you?
Adèle: The Fugees The Score
Nico: I'm still listening once in a while to Metallica And justice for all, that album made me want to play guitar and it is part of my "guitar DNA".
When someone hears your music for the first time, what do you hope sticks with them?
A connection with themselves and their own community, a connection with what makes us human, the tension between all of us. We hope they have the feeling that they could dance to our music in ancient ruins and feel their emotions.
