How Bonobo learned to get off the wheel

Simon Green has been Bonobo since 1999, when he'd just moved to Brighton in his early twenties, and a track on a Tru Thoughts compilation was as far as any of it reached. Animal Magic followed in 2000, dusty and downtempo, mostly self-played. Since then, the sound has drifted – Days to Come pulled from trip-hop, Black Sands turned towards jazz and club music – while Migration and Fragments both landed in the UK Top Five, picking up Grammy and BRIT nominations and billions of streams along the way. Most recently, he scored the anime series Lazarus, his first soundtrack. Every record picks up a new layer and still manages to sound unmistakably Bonobo.Now there's Distance in Static, out on Ninja Tune. In classic Bonobo fashion, it features collaborations with Arooj Aftab, Joy Crookes, Nilüfer Yanya, Ichiko Aoba, and others. Green, joining the call from his flat in Japan, is telling me this might be the last one made quite this way."I never really think about it like that," he says, when I ask what this record is pulling from. "I'm just making the music that I'm into." And yet, he can't quite help looking back this time. "With this one there's a bit of nostalgia woven into it, almost t...