Top 70 Bonobo Quotes

I’ve never been one of those musicians to differentiate between acoustic and electronic sounds. I just see it all as sound sources to be used. This translates into my live shows as well.

I think nostalgia is kind of dangerous in music.

You know, the one thing I’ve learnt or value from back in the day is the restraint and discipline you get when you’re limited by technology and equipment.

Fifty percent of what I’ve worked on is never going to get heard, but I think the important thing is just working.

All my records feel like a diary of the time and headspace they were made in and ‘Black Sands’ documents this in real time for me. A transition of falling in love with beatmaking again. An appreciation of a place and time and an anticipation for what was going to happen next.

I often have an idea and it starts splintering off into a whole lot of directions; I’m interested in exploring every single one of them.

Albums are just a punctuation of music. I don’t usually start out with a manifesto. Your tastes change with the process of the album. I just make music and put it out when there’s enough to call it an album.

The ability to have that mobility of music right now, where you can be in an airport with a sample library, it means that you can channel that mind-space you’re in when you’re overly tired and in an unfamiliar place.

I record a lot of stuff on my phone when I’m out and about and regularly use the recordings in my tracks.

DJ-ing taught me how to create a journey over the space of two or three hours.

You can’t live in the times that you live in and be exposed to all the new music that’s happening, ignore it all, and carry on doing the same stuff as you were ten years ago.

As a club DJ, it’s more about the room and the whole immersive experience of the club. In a live show, the focus is on the stage. It’s more of a performance, more of a spectacle.

I’ve spent a lot of time in Montreal, it’s one of my favorite cities in the world.

I was a musician first, the whole DJ-ing came after.

Sometimes it’s a discipline to try and not sound like myself.

I make music that I consider to be very personal. I think the main aspect is to make it as human as possible.

I’ve always wanted to do a big theater show in San Francisco.

New York is great in your twenties.

I’m always trying to find new things that I haven’t done before.

Ninja was able to survive its own hype and become a very strong label.

My records are not informed by whether the music is going to work live. I just kind of make the music I want to make and worry about how to deconstruct it for a band after.

I’m just a music fan.

I used to go to Glastonbury when I was young back in the ’90s, back when you could jump the fence.

Offsetting the sample position every time the sample hits will create more random movement in short samples.

I don’t make personality-driven music. Personality stagnates, people become tired of it. When it is purely about the music, that is what gives it longevity.

PaulStretch is a really out-there, standalone audio stretching engine. So with ‘Second Sun,’ I took a portion of what I was working on and took it into PaulStretch and then bring it back into the track to sit low in the mix as a drone version of itself. It gives the track a good base and a haunting texture to it.

If there was just music without any genres, then people would look at a lot of things afresh, and approach a record without any preconceptions.

Yeah, I’d definitely love to do some scores someday. I particularly love Hans Zimmer’s work.

I’ve noticed one in five ideas never amount to anything.

My parents and two sisters were great musicians but my family’s approach to music was always way more academic than mine. They were virtuoso players. But they were all impressed that I could sit down at a piano and find a melody. We had a different approach, we had mutual envy.

With something like ‘Second Sun’ it was something I’d never really done before. It has no drums and I think that was the first time I’d done this sort of instrumental, bass-less kind of piece.

I think on every album, I keep experimenting to go where I haven’t been before.

With places like Spotify and YouTube broadcasting these days, you get a track made in San Francisco broadcasting in London moments later, so it’s more global now.

Life has highs, lows, loud and quiet moments, beautiful ones and ugly ones. Music is a reflection of life.

There’s this kind of dialogue between African music and dance music, especially Moroccan stuff, because it’s kind of ceremonial and has built-in repetition.

It’s one of those things that always astounds me, when I make a record and it connects with people.

My taste is developing constantly, and it goes in whatever direction it wants to go in – the music follows.

There was a time I was around those fan boats that go across swamps, and the fans had a really rich, multi-textural sound. So I used that as a waveform for a bass line on the title track for ‘Migration.’

The way I make music is often to kind of treat instrumentation like I would a sample.

People don’t necessarily know who I am. Some people think Bonobo is a band.

There’s a progressive arc in the sound of ‘Black Sands’ creation. The title track was the first piece in place. Then the other live-sounding tracks like ‘Animals’ and ‘El Toro.’

Some people like music to be far more immediate and make you dance straight away. But I like to engage with it on a different level and for it to have that human element where it moves you in an emotive way.

I respond to creativity well when I’m outside and reacting to experiences, not inside a studio.

Whenever l’ve travelled l’ve found myself affected in conflicted ways. Sometimes the new experiences inspire a path of self discovery, but at other points those situations can highlight insecurities and bring about feelings of displacement.

I think I’ve always had this thing where it’s music first.

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.

When I started touring and coming to San Francisco, especially, I felt the most at home in America, other than in New York.

I think you haven’t tried enough sometimes unless you’re suffering a bit.

A lot of music is like a diary for me.

I’m always just referencing whatever I’m listening to or wherever I am musically.

I often use a return channel to get some shape out of the bass. It’s a good way to split the frequencies of the bass so that the sub bass is clean and in mono and the higher end of the bass sound can be filtered off – have it on an audio channel and that’s where you can use effects.

Computers can be taught that certain tune or certain chords changes will sound pleasant together, but I don’t think it’s going to reach a point where a machine will generate ideas and styles.

For me, the energy when I’m DJ’ing should be about the dance floor and not about the person performing.

Out on the West Coast, I learned to snowboard in Whistler, and I’ve been to festivals in British Columbia, and played in Toronto so many times I can’t remember each one. Montreal too, is just one of my favourite cities on earth. I’ve played in Calgary, Winnipeg, Saskatoon.

I often find there’s an equal benefit to being in a comfortable, well rested studio session, but also the more pressured headspace of being in an airport or working at 7 A.M., fresh from the club with the music still ringing in your ears.

Erykah Badu sang with me at a sold out show in San Francisco which was great.

The process of making music is very therapeutic; it’s late at night and I’m wearing headphones a lot of the time, so it becomes a way of zoning out and engaging with my thoughts. It’s a solitary environment and process.

I feel like Canada’s almost a second home at this point.

I never used to be able to work on the road, I was always strictly in the studio. But not everything’s gotten smaller – I have Ableton on the laptop now and a sample library, which means I can use that downtime to pour it into the music.

As a DJ you spend a lot of time on your own, in airports, away from friends, away from your home. That can have a big impact.

I do really long DJ sets – I play for five or six hours sometimes – but the live shows are a bit more compact. The arch of how to tell a story, where the energy is, where you have peaks and drops, where things go up and things come down, that’s all being informed by DJ-ing.

Albums are a journey, and I even find that as a DJ, with less than two hours, I can barely communicate anything. So I like to play long sets.

Ninja has definitely kind of changed its identity since it first started out. Ninja back in the day was always turntables and jazz and sampling and electronica. But over time, it’s become quite diverse and open to songwriting in a variety of forms.

I come from a film background as I studied film at art school.

Every record I’ve made, I’ve mixed and engineered at home.

I didn’t really think my music was good enough to be heard by anyone. I had some friends who were releasing records who were older than me, and within that group, I was always the younger, patronized friend who was making tunes as well, which everyone thought was cute.

I like messing around with sounds.

You have to engage with the current palette of the world, and what that sounds like.

Outlier’ came together pretty quickly. There’s no real telling why that happens, sometimes the thing is just more intricate and takes longer you know, there’s actual labour to be done in terms of sound design whereas other things are much freer.