Bonobo

Laid-back London groove maestro Simon Green (alias Bonobo) returns after a considerable absence (on the recording front, at least) with this fourth full-length helping of his masterfully mellow monkey magic. While it's not terribly divergent from the future-jazz cut-ups that made his earlier efforts such an instinctively natural fit with the turn-of-the-century Ninja Tune stable, Black Sands evidences a clear evolution into a more distinctive, sophisticated, and complex style, resulting in his most musically adventurous work to date, and certainly his most modern-sounding. Green's clearly been keeping his ear to the ground for a bit of rhythmic reinvigoration: the immediately striking "Kiara" reworks the hauntingly elegant string refrain that opens the album with submerged vocal splices and a halting, head-nodding left-field hip-hop beat á la relative Ninja Tune newcomer Flying Lotus…

On his 2013 release The North Borders, British producer Simon Green (aka Bonobo) continues along the organic-meets-electronic path that his 2010 release Black Sands followed, but this walk takes place as it's turning to dusk, and there are varying degrees of mist and chilliness along the way. Opener "First Fires" with Grey Reverend (singer/songwriter L.D. Brown) sounds like it could be quite warm, but it's entirely autumn-minded sweater music that wistfully wonders what to do with "faded dreams" as Green allows bits of glitchy sunlight to shine through his cloudy synth construction. "Emkay" is the clangs and echoes of a seaside port at night that wonderfully shuffles its way up to a lighthouse tune, then there's majestic songstress Erykah Badu wonderfully vibing ("We don't need no truth/Got plenty/Now it grows on trees") on "Heaven for the Sinner" over Bonobo's deep version of the broken beat. "Towers" suggests sleepy urban buildings in twilight with a vibraphone representing the little bits of life and light that will sparkle through the night, while "Don't Wait" is just before the dawn, as innocent chimes chase away the eerie things that lurk in the darkness.

With the experimental warmth of '60s French films and the pizzicato flavor of horizontal hip-hop, Simon Green's Bonobo project established the welcome niche of a pretension-free, post-party intellectual chillout. An almost silent figure among Ibizian romanticists, Green began in Brighton, debuting in 1999 with a track on Tru Thoughts Recordings' When Shapes Join Together compilation. Though tempted by offers from Mute and XL after the official issue of "The Scuba EP" and the "Terrapin" single, Green stuck with Tru Thoughts for the acclaimed debut LP Animal Magic.

Simon Green aka Bonobo returns with his third album and the kind of quantum leap in quality that very few artists make. "Days To Come" has the feeling of a classic all over - a big, brooding, emotional and uplifting record that you can dance to, do the dishes to, or sit and really study.
Green has always been expert at welding together music dripping with atmosphere, combining his own musical and technical talents in such a way as to make utterly organic-sounding machine music. This is not just a knob-twiddling producer but a multi-instrumentalist at work, who writes, plays and then manipulates almost every note of music he releases…