How Bonobo learned to get off the wheel

Simon Green has been Bonobo since 1999, when he'd just moved to Brighton in his early twenties, and a track on a Tru Thoughts compilation was as far as any of it reached. Animal Magic followed in 2000, dusty and downtempo, mostly self-played. Since then, the sound has drifted – Days to Come pulled from trip-hop, Black Sands turned towards jazz and club music – while Migration and Fragments both landed in the UK Top Five, picking up Grammy and BRIT nominations and billions of streams along the way. Most recently, he scored the anime series Lazarus, his first soundtrack. Every record picks up a new layer and still manages to sound unmistakably Bonobo.

Now there's Distance in Static, out on Ninja Tune. In classic Bonobo fashion, it features collaborations with Arooj Aftab, Joy Crookes, Nilüfer Yanya, Ichiko Aoba, and others. Green, joining the call from his flat in Japan, is telling me this might be the last one made quite this way.

"I never really think about it like that," he says, when I ask what this record is pulling from. "I'm just making the music that I'm into." And yet, he can't quite help looking back this time. "With this one there's a bit of nostalgia woven into it, almost throwbacks to things I've done before, revisiting certain themes. But every record exists in the time it was made." He says it "goes everywhere," parts of it sit somewhere near Microhouse, while a Joy Crookes feature pulls him into a throwback soul sound he hasn't tried before. “So maybe that's what's newer here.”

Nostalgia is the thing he keeps circling back to without quite wanting to. "I don't like to dwell in nostalgia, I don't think it's very good for anyone," he says, before explaining how it found its way in anyway. "It's more a reflective thing – I was thinking about how long I've been doing this, what it actually means at this point. I'm not trying to win anyone over any more. It's a reflection and appreciation of being allowed to still be here, still doing it."

Most of the record was made the way Bonobo records tend to be made – on the road, at the kitchen table, on a laptop, on the couch, over two or three years, wherever Green happened to be. Then, for a stretch, it stopped. "There was a period where I had maybe 40 or 50 tracks and hadn't finished a single tune in two years." What ended it wasn't a breakthrough so much as a change of address. Neil Young offered him time at Broken Arrow Ranch, and Green took it – no distractions, nowhere else to be. “That time in the studio in the woods was about turning those ideas and demos into finished songs. I needed serious time to focus on finishing an album.”

Not every track came out of that isolation, though. The best story on the record happened almost by accident, in a session with Arooj Aftab that had no plan attached to it at all. "We were working together for a couple of days, demoed a few songs, and on the second day we said, let's just fuck around and see what happens." Green had a guitar loop sitting in the session from earlier that morning, recorded without much thought. He played it back. "She went, 'What is this?' I said, 'I don't know, some dumb shit I did this morning.' She said, 'Why don't I try these lyrics on this?'" Aftab sang in Urdu, using words from a poet friend, and the song "Fire in the Water" was finished within the hour. "It was this really genuine, authentic moment, and the song fell out in an hour or two."

Elsewhere the record reaches back decades and several thousand miles, into a catalogue of Iranian folk and pop from the '60s and '70s. An archive administrator gave Green free rein over the whole discography. "There's such a rich heritage of folk and pop music to come out of Iran," he says, naming the track, "Shokoufeh", after the artist he sampled. "Now more than ever feels like a good time to remind people about that cultural heritage."

Some of the record's most straightforward moments came from the least considered process. "Me and You" was already turning up in Green's DJ sets before the album was even announced. "I made it on my kitchen table," he says – the same origin story as a good chunk of the record. "You're running it to people who have no idea what the song is, and it gets a great reaction – there's a familiarity even though they've never heard it before." Not everything survives that kind of test. "Memory Signal" ended up on a mysterious white-label 12", dished out to select record shops, rather than on the album proper. “The record needed the balance it has. Sometimes stuff just never comes out at all, and that's fine too.”

Green keeps a close eye on new music even while he's deep into making an album, and one record he kept returning to here was DJRUM's Under Tangled Silence. "Especially at the start of this record, I was looking to that one as a really well-structured album," he says. "I love how it weaves in and out of these acoustic, experimental pieces into more drum-heavy electronic stuff. It's got that nostalgic breakbeat thing, those 808 sounds and classic drum breaks, but brought into a really new, exciting direction." 

25 years in, Green says the decision to step off the album cycle is less dramatic than it sounds from the outside. "It's quite liberating, actually. Since my early twenties I've been on this circle – make an album, promote it, tour it, then it's time to make another one. I've decided I'm going to get off that wheel." Not retirement. Not necessarily fewer records, even. "I'm going to do whatever feels good, and that might mean releasing music differently, shorter or more specific projects rather than long-form records. I haven't decided. That's really the main thing."

"Some of that pressure is on myself," he says. “The longer you do it, the more you're thinking about where you are in the cycle. Back around the second or third album there was this ravenous need, 'when's the new record dropping,' and that's a bit more satiated now. Music is important, but it can't be everything – it has to be secondary to life. I still have so much love for it, but there's more to it than chasing that circle.”

He doesn't tie it up neatly when I ask if this counts as a closing statement. "I don't think it is going to be the last Bonobo, maybe the last one in this format," he says. "I think it's trying to say all the things the records before it have said, but in a way that's not exactly closure, more a bit of a closing statement, maybe."

"Who knows."