Gorgeous 100 Selected Quotes By - Bonobo

Gorgeous 100 Selected Quotes By - Bonoboe

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.

— Bonobo

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.

— Bonobo

A lot of music is like a diary for me.

— Bonobo

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

— Bonobo

For me, I really like listening to music really loud.

— Bonobo

If something is done really well then the question of live vs. DJ vs. instruments vs. drum machines doesn't matter - it's all just about taste, really.

— Bonobo

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.

— Bonobo

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

— Bonobo

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.

— Bonobo

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

— Bonobo

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

— Bonobo

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

— Bonobo

I listen to records I made years ago and it takes me back to that time, so why not actually put a bit of the life that you're living at the time into the music?

— Bonobo

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

— Bonobo

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.

— Bonobo

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.

— Bonobo

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

— Bonobo

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.

— Bonobo

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.

— Bonobo

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.

— Bonobo

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.

— Bonobo

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.

— Bonobo

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.

— Bonobo

I really enjoy DJing but I couldn't DJ exclusively. I couldn't produce exclusively either, that would involve spending a lot of time in isolation. But l do enjoy performing the music l create to people. It's a release for me.

— Bonobo

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

— Bonobo

Towards the end of touring 'The North Borders' I had a lot of personal stuff going on - family members who had died - and I was feeling displaced.

— Bonobo

I think it's good to sort of push people's expectations a little bit. I've always been doing that.

— Bonobo

I definitely come from that background of the more subtle shifts, the long build... rather than the quick short-attention span dynamic.

— Bonobo

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.

— Bonobo

I think nostalgia is kind of dangerous in music.

— Bonobo

In the very beginning, I kind of had this hip-hop, cut-and-paste approach to music. The first record, especially, was from looking at people like DJ Shadow and A Tribe Called Quest, and I think a phase that a lot of people go through when they start sampling is to go out and stamp on twigs and try to record that kind of stuff.

— Bonobo

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

— Bonobo

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

— Bonobo

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

— Bonobo

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

— Bonobo

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

— Bonobo

I don't really write music in the traditional sense of chorus, verse. It's more experimental sounding. The process comes from an experimentation with noise.

— Bonobo

There was an immediate connection with the Bay Area from when I first came out years ago. Somehow, I always knew there would be. They embraced me as a sort of honorary San Franciscan for some reason.

— Bonobo

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.

— Bonobo

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.

— Bonobo

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.

— Bonobo

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.

— Bonobo

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

— Bonobo

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

— Bonobo

When I was young, I wanted to take a year off from college and come to India but never got a chance.

— Bonobo

Most of the time I approach a track as series of experiments: seeing what fits, and trying to manipulate sounds into each other so they have some kind of dialogue, and then start building a structure around it.

— Bonobo

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

— Bonobo

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

— Bonobo

Four Tet is somebody I respect a lot. There are other artists I admire like jazz pianist and composer Marc Moulin.

— Bonobo

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.

— Bonobo

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

— Bonobo

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.

— Bonobo

I like messing around with sounds.

— Bonobo

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.

— Bonobo

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.'

— Bonobo

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

— Bonobo

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

— Bonobo

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

— Bonobo

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.

— Bonobo

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.

— Bonobo

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

— Bonobo

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.

— Bonobo

When I was 16 I was in a neo hardcore band called Finger Charge. I played the drums with my shirt off.

— Bonobo

When you're traveling, it's easy to ignore your situation. But once the dust settles, it catches up with you.

— Bonobo

New York is great in your twenties.

— Bonobo

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.

— Bonobo

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.

— Bonobo

Yeah, it's a kind of weird thing because I don't define myself as an electronic musician. It's certainly a part of it, and you know I have a band as well, and we go on a tour bus like other bands.

— Bonobo

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.

— Bonobo

I was in bands, like everyone else, when I was 16, 17; I was a little skater listening to Dead Kennedy's and Steel Pole Bath Tub. It was through early 90s Hip Hop that I found my way to Soul and Funk, and then out the other side into beats.

— Bonobo

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.

— Bonobo

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

— Bonobo

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.

— Bonobo

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.'

— Bonobo

I always have trouble recording drums and double bass.

— Bonobo

It's hard for me to use any electronic sounds at all, really. I'm always just layering acoustic sounds.

— Bonobo

If you're in a current mind state where you know what you want from the track, you can't just leave it and expect to come back with the same mindset.

— Bonobo

I'm just a music fan.

— Bonobo

I struggle with arrangements. I take forever doing them. It gets to a point where I've been playing around with things on loops for days. I always paint in broad strokes - very quickly, I'll feel out the larger structure - but it's putting the details in that I find the hardest part.

— Bonobo

People think about L.A. as being sunny and relaxed, but there's a darker side to it. There's people living in tents under bridges in their thousands. The culture almost encourages you to look the other way.

— Bonobo

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

— Bonobo

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

— Bonobo

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

— Bonobo

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

— Bonobo

Having the opportunity to see cool places all over the world is fun.

— Bonobo

I was in bands when I was younger, and that's a lot of the reason I started working solo - it was always a compromise.

— Bonobo

When I made my first record, I was very naive, and I didn't know much about production, and I had a very basic amount of equipment, and I was just digging through vinyl for samples in a very old-fashioned way. It was very loop-based and very cut and paste, and that's the way I started out.

— Bonobo

You really only have to use one half of your brain when you're deejaying.

— Bonobo

There were a lot of labels in the '90s that were fashionable for a time and then crashed.

— Bonobo

The only criteria I have with every new album is to keep moving on from what I've done before.

— Bonobo

I'm not keen on terms like 'lounge' or 'chill out.'

— Bonobo

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

— Bonobo

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.

— Bonobo

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

— Bonobo

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

— Bonobo

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

— Bonobo

When DJing works and the room is with you then it's one of the most enjoyable things you can do.

— Bonobo

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.

— Bonobo

That's when things get exciting - when you're outside the comfort zone, trying different things.

— Bonobo

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.

— Bonobo

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