Bonobo
“Oh yeah, I guess I did do some of that stuff,” says Simon Green, as he reflects on his 25-year-plus career as the man behind the music of Bonobo. It’s a typically self-effacing response from an artist who has spent that time forging a path as one of the defining voices in electronic music. A path that along the way has seen him release two Top-10 Albums (2017’s ‘Migration’ and 2022’s ‘Fragments, which both landed at #5 on the UK chart), plus numerous Gold and Silver certified singles, sell over 900,000 records, rack up billions of streams, collaborate with the likes of Erykah Badu and Damon Albarn, and be both BRIT and GRAMMY-nominated – the latter seven times, with five in the dance/electronic categories, a record number of nominations shared with The Chemical Brothers, Skrillex and Madonna.
His renowned live show – built around a full live-band, guest vocalists and immersive visuals – has also set the blueprint for how and where an electronic musician can translate their records into the live arena. He has performed to millions of people across the globe, with sold-out shows at prestigious venues like the Sydney Opera House, Alexandra Palace and Red Rocks Amphitheatre – in many cases as one of the first electronic artists to do so – and the world’s biggest festival stages including Glastonbury, Coachella, Sonar and Fuji Rock. His last tour also included both a co-headline of London’s Field Day (alongside Aphex Twin), and a historic sold-out 5-night residency at the Royal Albert Hall, which was the longest consecutive run there by a solo artist, and the longest ever by an electronic musician.
Alongside this, Green’s OUTLIER events and DJ sets have continued to place him at the centre of contemporary dance music culture, connecting with generations of club-going audiences in warehouses, festivals and underground venues alike. He has curated lineups in recent years that featured the likes of Barry Can’t Swim, Sofia Kourtesis, salute, Kelly Lee Owens, Mall Grab, DJ Tennis, SG Lewis, Carlita, Elkka, HAAi, John Talabot, Paula Tape and many more, with his 15,000-capacity OUTLIER showcase at Drumsheds in London becoming the fastest-selling event of the season, and a sold-out “homecoming” OUTLIER show at the 10,000 capacity On The Beach (Brighton).
“I want to reinforce this idea that you can be more than one thing,” Green explains. It’s that duality – of live artist and DJ, introspective composer and club-focussed selector – that sits at the heart of latest album ‘Distance in Static’, a record that is full of depth, detail and emotion; both beautiful and banging; quintessentially Bonobo, yet pushing beyond the contours of what a Bonobo album has traditionally been.
Across the record he collaborates with a typically striking cast of artists including Arooj Aftab, Joy Crookes, Nilüfer Yanya, Ichiko Aoba, Nicole Miglis and Aanya Martin. Lyrics appear in English, Urdu and Japanese, while historic Iranian samples and guzheng recordings sit alongside Green’s own meticulously processed instrumentation, woven together across recording sessions spanning LA, Tokyo, London and beyond.
A large portion of the record was created at Neil Young’s legendary Broken Arrow Ranch studio in Woodside, California – an environment Green describes as deeply immersive and creatively transformative. “It’s quite a mental place,” he recalls. “There’s this picture of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young all jamming there with their shirts off in their 20s, and it’s like you see the picture and then you look over and there’s the place and there’s the studio and there’s the tape machine. There’s something quite magical about it creatively.”
Hidden among woods and rivers, the sessions became almost monastic in nature: “I didn’t leave that place for two weeks straight. I didn’t go into town. I didn’t shave. It was just very, very focussed. I was just making soup and coffee and working. Building a little fire in the cabin. Hiking around in the woods in the morning. Hanging out by the river. It was social isolation as well, not really speaking to anyone. It was very meditative.”
A pivotal track to emerge from these Ranch sessions was the enchanting “Fire on the Water”, featuring Arooj Aftab, who travelled down from her NYC base to record what became a breakthrough moment during the album’s creation. Evolving, almost accidentally, from a rough acoustic guitar loop recorded while Green was testing studio inputs one morning. On hearing it, Aftab responded immediately, layering vocals in Urdu – the lyrics inspired by poetry from a close friend – to produce one of the record’s standout moments. “When that song happened, that’s when I could first see an album coming into shape,” says Green. “We were both like, ‘Oh, this is really special’.”
Elsewhere, tracks like “Drift” and “Me and You” perfectly encapsulate the album’s club-focussed leanings, with both quickly emerging as firm fan favorites in Green’s recent DJ sets. The latter, a “kitchen table banger” built originally on his laptop shortly after returning home from touring, was borne from a desire to create something driven almost entirely by rhythm, inspired by the kind of percussive sounds he’d been hearing in the club. “It was very joyful and it sort of popped out quite quickly in a couple of days,” he explains. “I’ve been playing it out ever since.”
Other standout collaborations on the record include the soulful intimacy of “Always on Your Side” with Joy Crookes; the lo-fi instrumentation of “Youths Fountain” featuring Nilüfer Yanya – notable as a track that also features every musician involved in the forthcoming live show; and “Talk to Me” featuring Nicole Miglis (Hundred Waters), marking the first time Green has collaborated with a vocalist twice on his records, and featuring a backstage recording of the pair harmonising during vocal warmups on the ‘Fragments’ tour. Elsewhere the album takes in delicate ballad “Equinoctial”, featuring renowned Japanese artist Ichiko Aoba, and “Can’t You See” featuring London-based vocalist Aanya Martin.
There are moments of emotional weight amongst the album’s most club-driven tracks, too, with “Uncasually” named after the online handle of a close friend of Green who passed away last year, honouring her through the kind of ecstatic dancefloor release she would have loved most.
The title of the record – ‘Distance in Static’ – is perhaps also an appropriate indicator for where Green finds himself now, evoking images of fuzzy transmissions and transient frequencies; fragments of memory and meaning echoing back through more than two decades at the forefront of electronic music. He sees the traces of his own work reflected in a younger generation rediscovering 90s trip-hop, downtempo and leftfield electronic music through a contemporary lens. “I think the front end of what I’ve done has now become something that’s referential to younger people,” he says.
“I liked the idea of listening for a distant signal — trying to find something in the noise,” he continues, and there’s a sense throughout the record of searching for transcendence: music suspended somewhere between intimacy and scale, the familiar and the unknown. The album’s visual world, created alongside celebrated designer Trevor Jackson, reflects this shift too. Moving away from the landscape-inspired aesthetics of earlier Bonobo records, ‘Distance in Static’ instead draws on microscopic photography by renowned photomicrographer John I. Koivula, creating crystalline alien worlds that feel simultaneously natural and otherworldly. Those themes will also run through the brand new live show, designed in collaboration with Pierre Claue – renowned for his work with Air, Gesaffelstein, Phoenix, and Caroline Polachek – to deliver another evolution in the Bonobo live experience.
Buried within the ‘Distance in Static’ universe, there is also a sense that this record – and particularly the accompanying live tour – marks something quite monumental, too. It’s a moment of transition, a celebration of Bonobo’s 25 years, but also, perhaps his last record in the traditional sense: complete with expansive guest features and a multi-year full live-band world tour. “It’s probably the last go-around the track in this format,” he admits. And on the future? “I don’t know what that will look like just yet, but It’s really about me redefining how to be a musician from here.”
Whatever comes next, one thing is for sure: ‘Distance in Static’ is arguably Green’s finest record to date; as ambitious and forward thinking as ever, and a reminder, if ever one was needed, of why Bonobo has remained such an influence on so many, for so long.