Bonobo: The North Borders

"If you've ever paid attention to the sounds between the stories on All Things Considered, the music of Bonobo may sound familiar. Bonobo is the recording name for British composer and DJ Simon Green, a star of the electronic-music world. Green's new album, The North Borders, began when he was playing his thumb piano alone in his attic studio — a process culminating in the creation of a track called 'Cirrus.' 'The way I make music is often to kind of treat instrumentation like I would a sample,' Green says. 'The main thing that I did [with "Cirrus"] was just to take the decaying tails of two notes of that thumb piano and then put them against this kick drum and make it into some kind of cohesive whole. I'm just trying to sort of push the ideas of what can create melody, what can create rhythm, and how drum sounds don't necessarily need to come from drums, but can come from a different place.' When traveling, Green often visits record stores in search of samples. The basis of the song 'Transits' is a recording of a vibraphone and harp that he'd found in Boulder, Colo. 'I put it into the sampler and I played around with the tuning and did some processing to it,' Green says. 'Again, it's about sort of re-contextualizing the sound and bringing it into a very different place from where it started'" (NPR Staff, "Bonobo," All Things Considered, 4/5/13).

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