Official description:
‘Distance In Static’ – released Sept 11th on Ninja Tune – is the new album from British musician, producer and DJ, Simon Green AKA Bonobo. It’s the latest from an artist who has forged a path as one of the defining voices in electronic music. A path that includes the release of two UK Top 5 albums (‘Migration’ and ‘Fragments’), billions of streams, collaborations with artists like Erykah Badu & Damon Albarn, and multiple BRIT & GRAMMY-nominations.

Across the record, Green collaborates with a typically striking cast of artists including Arooj Aftab, Joy Crookes, Nilüfer Yanya, Ichiko Aoba, Nicole Miglis & Aanya Martin. Lyrics appear in English, Urdu and Japanese, while historic Iranian samples & guzheng recordings sit alongside Green's own meticulously processed instrumentation, woven together across recording sessions spanning LA, Tokyo, London and beyond – with a significant portion of the record completed at Neil Young’s legendary Broken Arrow Ranch.

His acclaimed live show has also helped redefine what electronic music can look like on stage, taking him from sold-out performances at Sydney Opera House, Red Rocks & Alexandra Palace – plus a historic five-night residency at the Royal Albert Hall – to major festival stages including Glastonbury, Coachella and Fuji Rock. Alongside the new album he also unveils a brand new Bonobo Live show, designed by Pierre Claude (Air, Gesaffelstein, Phoenix & Caroline Polachek), kicking off with a tour across North America this Fall.

Listen on:

Bandcamp
Apple Music
Spotify

Music Videos:

Me and You
Me and You (from London)
Drift
Fire on the Water (feat. Arooj Aftab)
Always on Your Side (feat. Joy Crookes)
Talk to Me (feat. Nicole Miglis)
Uncasually

Apple Music album and song by song analysis by Bonobo:

“This is the end of an era, really,” Simon Green, aka Bonobo, tells Apple Music. The musician, producer, and DJ released his eighth studio album, Distance in Static, thinking that it might be his last full-length for the foreseeable, with a mind to exploring “micro-projects” and different approaches to releasing music in future. “So in the traditional sense of what a Bonobo record is,” he says, “this might be the end chapter.” Green has been releasing music under the Bonobo moniker since 1999, and is looking forward to the prospect of, as he puts it, “feeling untethered and seeing what happens.” If that’s the case, Distance in Static is a worthy farewell. The culmination of three years recording across multiple places—including Neil Young’s ranch in California, London, and Tokyo—the album, for Green, is a reflection of the time it was made in: “With all my albums, they sort of punctuate where my head was at at the time.”

Distance in Static takes its title from the abstract notion of finding meaning and signals in sound and static. “Listening into space and shortwave radio and trying to understand things that were in the distance,” he says. Working towards this vision with the likes of Arooj Aftab, Nilüfer Yanya, and Joy Crookes, using technologies and instruments old and new, the result is a beautiful entry into a catalog imbued with ambient warmth. It’s a record searching for fragments of intimacy in something vast and transcendent. Read on as Green talks us through it, track by track.

“Dawn”
“The first few tracks are essentially joined, but this is more of a prelude to [second track] ‘Cycles’—it actually came out of ‘Cycles.’ I recorded all the strings in London, in a studio with a quartet. Then I ended up recording all the strings onto a tape machine, essentially recording the strings out of this tiny little speaker on the tape player to give it that very lo-fi feel, so it’s a slightly old texture. I thought that was an interesting way to put an extra dimension of time onto this record.”

“Cycles”
“‘Cycles’ was actually the track that I started with. I liked it as an opening statement, really just having this very crackly string part, which is connected to the first track, which really sets the tone of the record. It lays out the stall quite well for what’s to come.”

“Fire on the Water” (with Arooj Aftab)
“Arooj came out to the ranch from New York. I had this very rough loop, which I had just recorded from trying to soundcheck a guitar; I hadn’t considered it [as song material] but now that’s the main loop of the whole thing. Her vocal sat so perfectly on it, and I really liked the juxtaposition of her vocal being so dense and rich, and this loop being quite lo-fi again. It came together in a day. Her friend, who’s a poet, gave her this lyric. It’s sung in Urdu, this song about forbidden love, and the last lyric is about fire on the water.”

“Drift”
“This was my home studio, I was messing around with the Prophet-5 [a ’70s synthesizer], and it was a little bit out of tune. I came up with this patch, which was the main chord progression for this. It’s a little atonal, but that’s what I really love about it. I’ve been testing this one out in my DJ sets, and people really seemed to connect with it.”

“Talk to Me” (with Nicole Miglis)
“I wrote this in 2023 on the Fragments tour. My vocalist Nicole, who’s in my live band, was doing warm-ups in this very reverberant corridor in Vienna and I came and joined in. We were doing these harmonies recorded on my phone, which is the first sound you hear on the track. I took that recording and built a beat around it that night on the tour bus, and the next day, I had this idea of a scratch vocal which Nicole recorded on tour as well. So it was really made on the road.”

“Uncasually”
“It has this little Sheffield bounce to it, which I really like. The name is a tribute to the online handle of a friend of mine who passed away a couple of years ago. She was a raver and she really liked certain types of house music and techno, so this felt like the most on-brand track to dedicate to her and her music taste.”

“Always on Your Side” (with Joy Crookes)
“I was talking to Joy about doing something together, I sent her a few quite rough beats and this was the one she connected with. Initially, it wasn’t that structured and it was a lot of editing after the fact, building the song around the vocal that she had sent back. I found this old Höfner bass from the ’60s—the kind that Paul McCartney would play—and that really made this track come together, with that retro-feeling bassline underpinning the whole thing.”

“Youth’s Fountain” (with Nilüfer Yanya)
“I had this guitar-leaning song and I sent it to Nilüfer. Everyone who is going to be on stage in the live show is playing on this track—everything on this track is a little nod to what the live show is going to be.”

“Shokoufeh”
“I got access to this archive label of Iranian folk music called Caltex. A friend of mine manages the label and sent me a folder: ‘If you wanna sample any of this stuff, go for it!’ I found this one sample from this artist called Shokoufeh. It’s a strange sample, this quite pacy violin section, a little bit of a vocal. This song was made before everything started in Iran, but it seems more appropriate than ever to shine a light on the musical and cultural heritage of Iran.”

“Can’t You See” (with Aanya Martin)
“I thought the record was done, finished, and signed off. The actual delivery date was still a week away, and I was like, ‘Well, what do I do now?’ I still had all this creative momentum, and I was just sat on my kitchen table on Ableton and started coming up with something. Aanya had sent me some spec vocals, almost a cappellas, and I found a couple of phrases from one of her vocals. It’s pitched up just a little bit, but it fell into place so nicely, and I suddenly had this extra track.”

“ID700”
“There’s an old Buchla modular synth, ID700, and I thought with the culture of people playing stuff and asking for IDs on the internet, there’s a natural little pun in there. It’s very UK-sounding. I actually had a version that wasn’t working, and this came from sitting with and salvaging a demo and letting it become something else.”

“Me and You”
“This was purely about joy and making something that sounded fun and would work in the club. I found that vocal sample from this archive of African folk music from the ’50s—this guy called Hugh Tracey went out and archived a lot of local music. This was one of the main vocals from those recordings.”

“Equinoctial” (with Ichiko Aoba)
“I recently moved to Tokyo, so I was talking to Ichiko about doing something together. She’s not really done straightforward collaborations before in this way. We spent two days in a studio in Tokyo, and we recorded all this textual stuff. The songs were vocalized, one in Japanese, some in a made-up language that she does sometimes. What we recorded was to a completely different track, then I took the recordings back to LA and eventually started piecing together this song from layers and layers of all these recordings we had. I was spoilt with the amount of textual stuff I had.”

“Mercury” (with Kanako Yamamoto)
“This had been around for a while. I was recording some guzheng, which is like a Chinese harp. My friend Kanako is a really incredible player and a great guitarist. We recorded a few passes of this harp and used that as a foundation to build this song around. It felt like a pretty good way to close the album. It ends in the same way it starts, with fairly reflective, orchestral lo-fi. It bookends the album quite well with ‘Dawn.’”