Where's Hibou?

Peter Michel of Hibou

The bedroom pop artist recorded his new album all over the world? Which locations can we hear in the music?

When we first checked in on Hibou in 2015, Peter Michel had recorded his debut album, Hibou, in his parents’ house. He now records in his apartment, and the locations of his apartments have gone intercontinental. He made his first album in Seattle, but he cut tracks for the new It Seems to Me in Sweden, Southeast Asia, New Zealand, Australia, Finland, Spain, and France, where he currently lives.

As “A Sweet Thought” from the new album shows though, Hibou’s dream pop could come from anywhere. His lead vocal is airy, understated, and sweetly melodic. Michel sings each line like a secret, maybe to one other person, maybe to himself, while the stylized sonics of ’80s new wave bring the song to hypnotic life with the ticking drums, the echoing fragments of guitar melody, and trebly, driving bass.

These days Michel lives in France, but you don’t hear France in the songs either. Maybe they soundtrack his inner life, or maybe it’s just a sound he loves.

Hibou will play Gasa Gasa on Saturday night with Kelly Duplex and Keaton Schiller opening.

Peter Michel didn’t plan to relocate to France. He went on a European tour with Hibou in 2020 before COVID shut down the world, and the Paris show turned out to be the kind of magic that changed his life. “I felt like I had taken all the right paths to land on that stage at that moment,” he says. “It was very emotional.” He had found his people, artists and musicians who got him. After the tour, “I went back and chased that feeling,” he says. When he found that Paris continued to pay off and the feeling wasn’t fleeting, he decided to make the city home.

COVID forced him to delay the move, but he used that time to get his paperwork in order. In 2021, Michel finally moved to Paris, where he lived for three years. While there, he once again found the feeling of community that inspired him before COVID. He wrote, he worked, and he collaborated with people he hadn’t worked with before. “I felt fulfilled,” he says.

While there, he recorded the 2023 Hibou EP Arc, which is as charmingly ethereal and engaging as anything else Hibou has done. Like It Seems to Me, you can’t hear an obvious influence of Paris on the project and, really, Michel doesn’t either. “It’s probably in the minute details,” he speculates, but he can’t point to examples. His real Paris project is Éclo, which stretched his talents as he worked with more acoustic instruments including strings and horns played by Parisian musicians. “That was fun because I don’t play most of those instruments,” he says. And for someone who has made bedroom pop his calling card, he enjoyed the experience of working with other people.

“Hibou’s a one-man show, at least for the recording process.”

Éclo was a literal expression of the community Michel found in Paris, and to honor it he decided to write the lyrics in French. He ran them by friends to make sure they said what he intended, but that process had an upside. It was really helpful as a language-learning program,” Michel says.

Éclo reflects the music Michel listens to now, whereas Hibou is the product of the music that got him interested in music in the first place. It’s a sound that found its form in 2011 or 2012, and one he has fine tuned since. The bass in “A Sweet Thought” points to his affection for New Order, and the way Peter Hook’s bass sits in New Order mixes affected Michel’s idea how about the bass should sound in his. He sends his tracks to an engineer to mix, and there always comes a point, he says, “when I say let’s bring up the bass.”

New Order, The Cure and The Smiths influenced Michel to the extent that they shaped his ideas about what sounds good, but you rarely hear them clearly in Hibou’s songs. As a singer, he drew more from shoegaze bands like My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive that matched light vocals with heavy sound, but he was also affected by Grouper, who matched that fragile singing style with more experimental sounds.

Because Michel records at home, it’s tempting to wonder if he sings quietly so that others can’t hear him. He says that’s not so, and that the truth is more direct.

“I always appreciated the more delicate sounding singing,” Michel says.

By now, recording at home is what Michel is used to so he’s comfortable doing it. He feels pressure in studios and he likes recording at home for aesthetic reasons. “You can hear the ease behind it,” he says of bedroom pop like his. “I think there’s still a lot of charm in that. I love the notion that it was recorded in a safe space.”

Maybe there is a sense of place in Hibou’s music then, and that place is his bedroom or his apartment, wherever that may be. We’re hearing sounds and songs influenced by the comfortable space he builds around himself wherever he goes. Each project evolves, Michel says, “from wherever I’m at in life, ‘at’ meaning where my head’s at.”