BONOBO Returns

Down tempo hero Bonobo - AKA Simon Green -  returns after a three-year hiatus, with a fresh new sound for the new decade. Ten years after the release of debut album Animal Magic, we caught up with the sampling genius just ahead of the release of Black Sands, and the live tour that goes with it.

Dazed Digital: So it’s been a few years since the last album and a lot has changed. Tell us about the Black Sands album!
Bonobo: Yeah, it’s been fucking ages actually! It took two years to make because I was touring. So how I started it and how I finished were two different things. It’s like a document of the two years, but hopefully it’s still cohesive. I had a bit of an epiphany about a year and a half ago and got back into beat making. Music, for me, got really exciting again.

DD: So you're optimistic about the way music is headed right now?
Bonobo: Yeah. The new London crew - Joy Orbison, Bullion, Floating Points - are doing great things. But I’m also getting into my Krautrock. On the album, there’s a lot of nods to that kind of late 70s, early 80s kind of sounds and the more current stuff out of New York, like Yeasayer and Phenomenal Hand Clap Band, that’s a very exciting sound at the minute.

DD: Was it a concern that you might lose the Bonobo sound by going new school?
Bonobo: Not really. I think there’s always going to be a kind of signature embedded in it. It’s my same methods, using a different palette of sounds. Actually I’m more concerned with not repeating myself with my little flourishes. Sometimes it’s a discipline to try and not sound like myself.

DD: So do you consider yourself more a musician than a producer?
Bonobo: Both. I was a musician first, the whole DJ-ing came after. I was in bands, like everyone else, when I was 16, 17; I was a little skater listening to Dead Kennedy’s and Steel Pole Bath Tub. It was through early 90s Hip Hop that I found my way to Soul and Funk, and then out the other side into beats. I got to Brighton in the late 90s and discovered samplers. Suddenly, I could be my own band with a guitar and sampler, getting my drums in charity shop records. It was better than bashing around in someone’s basement, trying to compromise ideas.

DD: You’re now touring with a live band, what’s it like going back to being a band again?
Bonobo: It’s come full circle now. It feels like it’s the right thing to do. I didn’t feel that just nodding into a laptop would be an honest way of representing my music live. It kind of opened it up. It confuses people though sometimes, they don’t know if its one dude, a band or what but I quite like the ambiguity of that.

DD: Your touring with Andreya Triana and producing her new album, how did that all come about?
Bonobo: We met through Gilles Peterson at the record of the year thing. He wanted us to get something together. We got together one afternoon and did a quick rehearsal, went up there, got drunk, she forgot all the words, and we hit it off after that. We ended up chatting about her record and I played her my new stuff and she said, “I’ve got an idea for that!”

DD: So what’s her new album sound like?
Bonobo: It’s basically a live record. I think people were expecting a Bonobo style beatsy soul record, which would have been the obvious thing to do. I’ve tried to juxtapose her sound with something a bit rawer. So it’s lo-fi, live drums and guitars and lots of hand percussion and bits of strings.

DD: Your stuff is played all over the place these days. What’s it like when you turn on the telly and your tune is on a shampoo advert?
Bonobo: I try and avoid it actually, but you get people on blogs saying, you’re music’s on a shampoo advert, sell out. I’m like; if you’d bought the record in the first place I wouldn’t have to. I turn stuff down too. There was one for MFI or something. I said no and week later they had a tune that sounded exactly like one of mine.

DD: So what’s Bonobo going to do next?
Bonobo:The immediate future, we’re just touring like a bastard, a month on the road in America, then straight to Europe, ending up at the Roundhouse, May 29th. I’m also doing this Barakas project, which is more of a dancefloor thing. Literally pure bassline music, not working towards as an album, just a 12”s project. I mean, where’s the relevance in making a whole album of dance floor music?