Top 100 Quotes & Sayings by Bonobo
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a British musician Bonobo.
Last updated on September 17, 2024.
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.
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 think you haven't tried enough sometimes unless you're suffering a bit.
I'm always trying to find new things that I haven't done before.
I like messing around with sounds.
Erykah Badu sang with me at a sold out show in San Francisco which was great.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When you're traveling, it's easy to ignore your situation. But once the dust settles, it catches up with you.
I record a lot of stuff on my phone when I'm out and about and regularly use the recordings in my tracks.
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.
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.'
Sometimes it's a discipline to try and not sound like myself.
I think nostalgia is kind of dangerous in music.
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.
I was a musician first, the whole DJ-ing came after.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I used to go to Glastonbury when I was young back in the '90s, back when you could jump the fence.
I'm not keen on terms like 'lounge' or 'chill out.'
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.
A lot of music is like a diary for me.
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.
You have to engage with the current palette of the world, and what that sounds like.
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.
I think I've always had this thing where it's music first.
I think it's good to sort of push people's expectations a little bit. I've always been doing that.
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.
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 make music that I consider to be very personal. I think the main aspect is to make it as human as possible.
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.'
It's hard for me to use any electronic sounds at all, really. I'm always just layering acoustic sounds.
When I was 16 I was in a neo hardcore band called Finger Charge. I played the drums with my shirt off.
New York is great in your twenties.
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 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.
I always have trouble recording drums and double bass.
I'm just a music fan.
I've noticed one in five ideas never amount to anything.
People don't necessarily know who I am. Some people think Bonobo is a band.
The way I make music is often to kind of treat instrumentation like I would a sample.
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.
I definitely come from that background of the more subtle shifts, the long build... rather than the quick short-attention span dynamic.
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.
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.
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.
For me, the energy when I'm DJ'ing should be about the dance floor and not about the person performing.
It's one of those things that always astounds me, when I make a record and it connects with people.
Offsetting the sample position every time the sample hits will create more random movement in short samples.
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.
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.
The only criteria I have with every new album is to keep moving on from what I've done before.
My taste is developing constantly, and it goes in whatever direction it wants to go in - the music follows.
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 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.
Fifty percent of what I've worked on is never going to get heard, but I think the important thing is just working.
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