Bonobo

Simon Green has been making music as Bonobo since 1999, starting with Terrapin, a song for a Tru Thoughts compellation, followed by his first album, Animal Magic, in 2001. Since then, despite being one of a number of talented British musicians/DJs in the London/downtempo scene, including Fila Brazillia, Four Tet, and Jon Kennedy, it’s been impossible to separate downtempo music from the ever-evolving Bonobean sound…

Simon’s first three albums, Animal Magic, Dial ‘M’ for Monkey, and Days to Come, all demonstrate the progressive mastery of a style at once uniquely his own and yet essentially human. I’ve searched long for the words to describe the sound, often resorting to phrases like:

It’s like Martin Denny’s Exotica, except you don’t laugh when you listen to it. You dream.

You know the feelings that come and go too quick to have a name?

“All my joys to this are folly,
Naught so sweet as melancholy.”

These early albums tell a story; they proceed; they are at once alike and distinct. As a musician and more importantly, as a lover of music, I wouldn’t feel my life complete if any of these albums were unknown to me, and yet, no one of them is Black Sands.

Black Sands

In modern semiotics, there is the notion of the transcendental signifier–that which points to the absolute, the real, the pure, the true, the beautiful–and the notion that there can be no such thing. It is argued that, lost as we are in a web of cognition, there can be no signpost that points to something outside the realm in which the signpost exists. Thus, if there is an absolute–a transcendental signified–neither our gurus nor our scientists are describing it.

But that idea’s bullshit.

Maybe it’s impossible for us to ever fully perceive, in the smallness of human facilities, the absolute, the pure, or the beautiful, but it’s not impossible to point to it. Masters of art and science have been doing so for as long as we’ve roamed the earth and I would not have written this article if I didn’t think in Black Sands you could find such pointers–buy the boatload.

Whatever shift of perception occurred between Days to Come and Black Sands–whatever transcendental signifiers Simon exposed himself to during that four-year gap–the difference shows. Where Bonobo’s earlier albums represent a series of signposts pointing from one to the next, Black Sands points, in the words of Flatland‘s most humble square, “upwards, but not northwards”.

The Tracks

The album opens with Kiara, a track whose strings are balanced against an endlessly transforming foreground of samples and synths, as if a cubist portrait, offering an infinitude of perspectives on the sweet, innocent sorrow of being away from home and elsewhere, wherever elsewhere is.

Kong continues where Kiara left off, drawing us further into the extra-planar perspective promised in the earliest moments of the Prelude. What’s most striking is that all the component parts are absolutely familiar–guitars, sampled drums, and swooning vocals all as we’d expect–and yet the product is absolutely unique.

Eyesdown exists purely to remind us of already, just a few tracks in, how far we’ve traveled. Perhaps only when compared to the bold otherness that permeates the rest of Black Sands, this single track conjurs memories of the reality we left behind. Maybe that’s why they made the track a single; maybe it was Andreya Triana‘s sublime crooning.

El Toro and We Could Forever follow, the subtle Latin flavor brightening the saxophones, strings, and flutes, suggesting that the world we’ve been carried to is so wide and richly varied that even if we had a thousand years and not just 55 minutes, we’d still never reach the ends of it.

1009 is the most “electronic” track and absolutely unapologetic about it. I’ve long wondered if the title does more than just expose this notion, but in fact refers to the first four tones, which sound an awful lot like dialing 1-0-0-9. Regardless, this track marks the beginning of the tumbling rapids and hallucinogenic waterfalls that will carry us without delay to the album’s finish.

All in Forms is akin to waking up within a dream, that same paradox of lucidity and unreality informing all of life’s mysteries with it’s unresolving drive towards the ever-more elusive truths we so desperately crave to hold, if just momentarily, just once before we die. And yet, it’s only at the song’s conclusion that we realize we were closer to that truth than we’ve ever been.

Adreya Triana returns for two exceptional tracks that offer a soulful description of what cannot possibly be put into words. The Keeper bravely informs us that “We can’t go on living this way” as if Dorothy finally realizing that “There’s no place like home”. Stay the Same lets us know why this is, and how:

Seasons change…
It will never be the same.
I’m hoping…
I won’t stay the same.
Reasons strange…
Why we all must play these games.

Animals brings us forward, it’s brash jazz and wholly acoustic quality only serving to enhance the exquisite enchantment of this elsewhere land we too soon must leave. The piece’s three movements (without return) reinforce our alienation, strangely not from the mystic world of Black Sands, but from our own world, so different as it is from what it means to be human, lost in the hinterlands of our own cognition, ever moving towards the absolute–the infinite–but never reaching it.

Black Sands quietly ends Black Sands. There is an unmistakable difference between the album’s adventurous beginning and it’s introspective end, the sense of time, of change, and of growth slipping through our fingers as easily as sand on the beach, filling us will sorrow despite the knowledge that long after we return home, we’ll still find traces of that magic dust where we least expect it, never certain whether still more remains.

If you like what you hear, you know what to do: