Stymied by “a blend of anxiety and boredom” in the lockdown days of the pandemic, Simon Green frequently drove outside of Los Angeles in search of “creative momentum.”
“It certainly wasn’t a very creative time,” Green, who records and performs under the moniker Bonobo, says over the phone between tour stops in D.C. and NYC. “I kind of tried to get out and do something a little bit different.”
He drove to Alabama Hills in the Owens Valley, its natural arches and smooth hillsides set against the jagged peaks of the Sierra Nevada. Having “overdone Joshua Tree at this point,” he drove to Death Valley, where he and his friend Dan Medhurst, a photographer, walked out into the shimmering haze heat toward the dunes that span the horizon. (“Some of the conditions can be a little extreme,” Green says of Death Valley, “but it’s a beautiful landscape, very alien. I feel like in comparison, if Joshua Tree was Coldplay, Death Valley would be Radiohead. It’s kind of a fair analogy.”) He sought even more “alien” landscapes and isolation in remote parts of Utah, where he, a British citizen unable to vote, could ride out the anxiety of the 2020 election away from cell service.
And slowly but surely, Green found the creative drive that would allow him to finish his seventh album, Fragments, a sweeping, exuberant collection of orchestral interludes, Detroit-influenced techno, shimmering house, irresistible pop and jazzy hip-hop that typifies the genre-defying, sample-laden sound Green has come to define over the last 20 years.
Working again with Neil Krug, who created the vast landscapes for Bonobo’s 2017 release Migration, Green partially submerged the listener in water for Fragments’ album art, creating a sense of movement, of transience, “a lack of permanence,” Green says.
Where Migration suggests immovable, ancient landscapes, carved over unfathomable amounts of time, Fragments highlights the constantly moving forces that create those landscapes.
Around the time when Migration was released five years ago, Green was acutely aware of “cycles of time” and impermanence as he coped with the death of both of his parents in a two-year timespan and took to the road nonstop with no real homebase to speak of. He eventually settled in Los Angeles after having given New York City a go for a while, and, when he wrapped up touring around Migration—which included a stop at Red Rocks with friend Nick Murphy, aka Chet Faker—Green told his longtime record label, Ninja Tune, that he needed some space before he could think about creating another album.
Never one to really sit still, Green placed his focus on Outlier, the name of his long standing resident DJ show at NYC’s now-defunct club Output. He intended to expand Outlier to become not only a series of shows he would put on in “unexpected” places (like Denver’s Wings over the Rockies Air and Space Museum, where Green et al stopped in late 2019) with pals like TOKiMONSTA (Jennifer Lee), Jaques Greene, and Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs (Orlando Higgenbottom), but an imprint focused on dance music for the club. By early 2020 he’d teamed up with Higgenbottom to produce the joyous, disco-driven track “Heartbreak” that would launch Outlier as both a record label and a roving party.
And then the pandemic happened. While the parties had to wait, Green offered “Heartbreak” as a way to dance away the uncertainty of the time.
“Like anybody needed another ambient lockdown record at that point,” Green jokes. “And it’s still fun to play it out now. People still haven’t heard it on big speakers.”
Almost a year ago, Outlier released its first full album, a tough but tender collection called A Tenuous Tale of Her by Poté, the Caribbean-born Sylvern Mathurin.
Collaboration has always been key to Green’s musical output, and has become a way for Green to continue his love-affair with layered sampling while avoiding the increasingly difficult work of licensing. For Fragments, Green enlisted out-of-the-box harpist and composer Lara Somogyi. Prior to lockdowns, Green was able to sit with Somogyi in the studio to capture more than an hour’s worth of original harp music that he was then able to build into Fragments. Somogyi’s harp runs throughout the album, creating continuity and that “organic” sound that so often gets applied to Green’s music.
The heart of Fragments is the track “Tides,” a heart-rending ballad that exemplifies Green’s ability to straddle genres, marrying Jamila Woods emotive, pop-focused vocals with samples of Somogyi’s harp, a bit of acoustic guitar, and a gentle yet driving beat that brings to mind the ebb and flow of waves.
“We cloud people, we live in gray,” Woods sings. “What we don’t need, release in rain / We cloud people we never stay / We hold our freedom like a blade / We won’t be dry soon / Here comes the tides / You move when I do / You’ll never be mine.”
Woods recorded the track from a studio in her homebase of Chicago and sent it back to Green, who said it nearly brought him to tears.
“I think the reason I’m working with a person in the first place is I kind of love what they do,” Green says. “So I don’t want to sort of parameter too much. I give people a kind of idea of what I think, here’s some themes and some ideas, but ultimately, I want to hear you. I want to give people their own sort of creative freedom, to self-contribute their own sounds and some of themselves.”
Green provides space for fellow Ninja Tune artist Kadhja Bonet to showcase her silky, ethereal vocals on closing track “Day by Day.” By Green’s own account, the track comes “full circle” back to tracks from his 2010 album Black Sands, considered his seminal work by many fans, where Green first brought in live recorded woodwinds—clarinets, oboes, flutes—for orchestral numbers like the title track and “Animals.” The album is beloved, to say the least, and Green is frequently asked, as he was in a March 9 Ask Me Anything on Reddit, if he’ll drop the “clubby” numbers and “go back” to the sounds of Black Sands.
Green was politely direct, as is his way.
“I get this a lot,” he responded. “I don’t think [my music has] completely changed from that era. There are tracks like ‘Elysian’ [from Fragments] or ‘Second Sun’ [from Migration] or ‘Day by Day’ that are very much in that arena. Also, Black Sands has tracks like ‘Eyesdown’ that were very ‘clubby.’ But more importantly, I think it wouldn’t be productive to stay in the same lane forever. Although there’s lineage thru (sic) these records, each is a statement from the time it was made. Black Sands was from a time [when] I lived in London and was obsessed with what was happening musically at that time. It wouldn’t make sense to keep making the same record over and over. I also think we’re attached to certain records because [of where] our lives were when we heard them, so maybe it’s more a desire to have that part of our lives back.”
Fragments offers the most refined version of Green’s style to-date, leaving little desire to look backward, and only joy at the thought of what’s to come.
