Skip to main content

Bonobo

38
Bonobo

Bonobo

What's a bonobo? A species of chimpanzees like you and me. Downtempo Brit Simon Green has been behind Bonobo ever since Animal Magic, the alluring debut album he released in 2000. Although not one for radical changes, the star of Ninja Tune's roster has, over time, moved away from the downtempo and chill-out delineations he was cast in early in his career towards more intricate soundscapes. That sense of nature is present in Green’s music; the sounds he uses tend to come from acoustic sources and he steers clear of digitally created noise, preferring to craft his own sounds to add a human warmth. Its chirpy percussion and hopeful melody leads into an album that covers expansive sonic spaces and defies categorization. In these troubled times, super-relaxed music is what we need. The journey Bonobo has made from his debut to 2017's Migration is a sense of wonder. Consistently chill. Consistently great. Bonobo is a true musician  making sophisticated music. It's hard not to over-use the word "chill" with his music so I am going to refrain from doing so. A good place to start is "Terrapin" and you can get caught up to speed with "Outliers" or his most recent "Linked". Bonobo is a British born, L.A.-based D.J. doing some of the best work in electronic music today. His most distinctive work tugs at the heart-strings rather than the feet on a dancefloor. His melodies and live instrumentation hint at a fondness for jazz, soul, folk, and minimalism. His hand-selected curated Late Night Tales mix shows just that. This man is soulful, samples from all over the world, and creates downright-damn-good-down-tempo music. Here's the logistics of his discography: 2000's Animal Magic, 2003's Dial 'M' for Monkey, 2006's Days to Come, 2010's Black Sands, 2013's The North Borders, and 2017's Migration which was inspired by his 18-month tour supporting his previous album. Migration is easily the most listenable record of Bonobo’s twenty-plus year career. It’s a record with equal appeal for electronic music fans and general listeners, something you could put on anywhere. Essentially, it recasts downtempo as a genre with more potential than party music.

Bonobo

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Eels

91 EELS EELS After a couple of song-rich, keyboard-dominated albums released under the Man Called E moniker, Mark Everett morphed into the trio Eels with 1996’s [DreamWorks Records released] Beautiful Freak . At its best, the debut gave a trip-hop twist to the California singer/songwriter tradition; at its worst, it suggests one more bummed-out wise guy’s take on Beck’s collage-style rock. With a sense of humor that skews toward cynicism that’s alleviated occasionally by bouts of sincerity, Everett is not the likeliest subject to make a transcendent album about death. But he nearly pulls it off on 1998’s Electro-Shock Blues . The music is somber but not sedate, with bursts of saxophone, off-kilter orchestration, and outright noise evoking the turbulence beneath the deadpan vocals. The singer battles not only depression but also his penchant for irony, and his struggle to move beyond them makes for a fascinating if sometimes morbidly downcast listen. On 2000’s Daisies of the ...

Björk

28 Björk Björk If Billie Holiday is an American treasure, well, if you were to put that treasure underwater, froze it, thawed it out centuries into the future and doused some acid & baking soda on it, out of that treasure chest would come Björk. Originally gaining fame in her home of Iceland with her band, the Sugarcubes, Björk was bound to break solo & she did just that with 1993's Debut . Following that was 1995's Post , 97's Homogenic , 2001's Vespertine, 2004's  Medúlla , 2007's Volta , 2011's Biophilia  (the first album where I was truly a fan), 2015's Vulnicura and 2017's Utopia . There's a lot to unpack there... you can't skip her first three or four albums, they're all amazing. I like Volta  just because it seems to be the loosest (and most fun) album she has. Vulnicura  was her break up album, with Björk expressing that the album reflects her feelings before and after her breakup and the healing process. Her legacy...

Elton John

93 Elton John Elton John The Elton Run is a great road-trip game: Using the radio’s scan and seek buttons, see how long you can keep a continuous streak of Elton hits rolling. It’s been proven possible to follow the Elton Run up I-95 from Virginia all the way to Boston. The hazard: One sixth of your listening will be devoted to “ Your Song ,” Elton’s most overplayed standard even though everybody is over it at this point (Sample lyrics: “If I was a sculptor / But then again, no,” I think we can all agree we don’t need to hear that cheesy line anymore.) But Elton has a staggering number of hits; At least one in the Top 40 every year from 1970 through 1995 (!). With his electric boots and mohair suits, he’s the prima of all donnas, sitting like a princess perched in his electric chair. He entertains by picking brains. He sells his soul by dropping names. And for all his camp flamboyance, he’s aged into the most beloved entertainer on earth. Elton’s got about a million compilatio...