Bonobo is what you put on when you’re tired of EDM but not tired of electronic music. That’s the whole pitch, and it’s been true for a quarter-century now. Where to start: “Kerala,” then Black Sands front to back, then Fragments when you’re ready to be converted.
Simon Green — that’s the actual human behind the name — started out as a bedroom producer in Brighton in the late ’90s, chopping up jazz and soul records into woozy, slow-burning instrumentals. The early stuff (Animal Magic, Dial ‘M’ for Monkey) is downtempo in the truest sense: head-nodding, sample-stitched, and lazily lumped in with “trip-hop” even though that word really belongs to the Bristol crowd. It’s beautiful and it’s a little sleepy, and if that were the whole story Bonobo would be a footnote in the same crate as Zero 7 and early Thievery Corporation.
But the arc is the thing. Black Sands in 2010 is where Green figures out how to make strings and woodwinds hit like a rhythm section — live players, arranged like someone who studied composition, not just a sample pack. Then The North Borders (2013) is the one where he starts pulling in proper guest vocalists — Erykah Badu, for one. By Migration in 2017 he’s making something that works equally well in your headphones at 2am and on a festival main stage at sunset. “Kerala” is the obvious entry point — built around a chopped, looping vocal that stutters until it stops sounding like a voice and starts sounding like an instrument. (That vocal is a sample of Brandy’s “Baby,” flipped until it’s pure texture.)
Here’s what separates him from the laptop crowd: Bonobo is a genuinely great live act. Green tours with a full band — horns, strings, a drummer, vocalists — and the show is the opposite of a guy nodding behind a MacBook. The tracks breathe differently with humans playing them, the builds land harder, and you understand why he books rooms most “electronic” producers can’t fill.
The lineage matters too. Bonobo’s debut, Animal Magic, came out in 2000 on Brighton’s Tru Thoughts, but the long partnership has been with Ninja Tune since 2003’s Dial ‘M’ for Monkey — and that’s the home of Amon Tobin, The Cinematic Orchestra, the whole downtempo/leftfield end of the label. It’s electronic music made by people who treat it as composition first.
Fragments (2022) is the one I’d hand someone who thinks they don’t like electronic music. Green made much of it stuck in place — the constant touring that usually fuels him cut off by the pandemic, the record clawed together in isolation as the world shifted around him. However it came together, the record sounds wide open and a little lonely — but it also has the hardest dancefloor moments of his career. “Rosewood” and “Tides” (the second with Jamila Woods) are the headphone tracks; “Otomo” is the one that detonates a room. It’s the rare late-career album from a veteran that actually pushes forward instead of doing a victory lap.
So if your relationship with electronic music starts and ends with a drop and a foam cannon, Bonobo is the off-ramp. No build-up/drop formula, no festival-bro energy, no four-on-the-floor for its own sake. Just a guy who’s spent twenty-five years proving that “electronic” and “musical” were never supposed to be opposites. Start with “Kerala,” then Black Sands front to back, then go see him live and report back. You’ll get it.