Bibio – “Dye The Water Green” (Live) (Official Video)

Warp Records, you are good to us.

This live version of “Dye the Water Green” by West Midlands, UK musician Bibio is some much needed Friday afternoon chill.

From Bibio himself, via the Warp site:

“A while back myself and some friends recorded three live trio sessions of some songs off my recent album Silver Wilkinson, it was a challenge to strip back some of the songs and make them work in a trio as the originals are quite layered. This was the first time I had ever attempted to perform my songs with a band. The sessions sounded better than I had expected so I thought it’d be nice to get back together with my friends in Somerset and record a live version of “Dye the Water Green.” This track is more layered than the previous tracks I’d recorded sessions for, so it was going to be another challenge to make this work with just a few people. My friend Ben, who plays baritone guitar on this video, suggested a backing vocalist, so he asked Rosie May if she’d be up for joining us. I used Rosie’s voice texturally, replacing some of the simple sax parts in the original. Tommy, who plays bass in the video, is an excellent musician and great player of many instruments. I decided to crop the outro out of the original version of DTWG and incorporate that meandering Moog bassline into the main body of the verses and choruses. It’s a bassline originally sequenced on a computer via MIDI so it was never intended to be played by a live musician, however I had great faith in Tommy being able to adapt it for bass guitar… and he did, in just one night of practicing. He had to tune the bass differently and one of the notes had to be “tapped” but he pulled it off. I was really impressed.”

“My friend Rich agreed to help with the camera work again, so on a sunny Thursday afternoon we set off on a train to Somerset with two heavy suitcases full of equipment, watching a setting sun over the flooded Somerset fields as far as the eye could see. On Friday night we went to see Ben’s new 7-piece salsa band perform their first gig. It was a great night, lots of beer was drunk and lots of shouting was done. So much so that when I woke up the next day—the day of the video shoot—my voice was all screwed up and I couldn’t hit the high notes. I was very close to calling the whole thing off. Ben told me to drink hot water and honey and Tommy gave me some vocal exercises. We dropped the tuning of the whole song by one semitone and later on in the afternoon my voice was back and we were good to go.”

I’m especially diggin’ the Careless Whisper-ish sax that comes in at 3:01.

Bibio – “Dye The Water Green” (Live) (Official Video)

The full version of “Dye the Water Green” appears on Bibio‘s The Green EP, the follow-up to last year’s album Silver Wilkinson.

If you haven’t heard his song “À Tout à l’Heure” (previously featured on this blog) you really should. It’s great and it’s here.