Simon Green, aka Bonobo, has been gently gliding through a kind of soft electronica, music whose warm embrace, has for some years explored the ways in which elements of music from other continents can lend to the dance-floor a dream-like quality that escapes the hard edges characteristic of so much technology.
Distance in Static finds him collaborating weaving a series of dreamscapes that combine an enchanting sense of space – laden with gentle reverb, with a heart-calming feeling of intimacy: a paradoxical magic that calms as much as it entrains, calls to the dance as much as it conjures healing stillness.
The more up-tempo tracks – including “Cycles” ,“Drift” and “Uncasually”, are delicate grooves, built on the club syntax of breakdown, build-up, and drop, the exciting yet comforting tropes that keep a crowd moving through different moods, in a collective swoon. There are moments when he could be shadowing Jon Hopkins, though with less in the way of surprises. Bonobo soothes instead.
He has invited a super-talented selection of voices – mostly female: a star-in the making Aanya Martin, fully able to hold her own against a cinematic backdrops of soft beats and synths. The gifted British Asian Joy Crookes, and Nicole MIglis’s sweet and sensual voice who was noticed for her first solo album Myopia. All of them, including Nilüfer Yanya, with subtly individual vocal styles, all of them perfectly-suited to the soft-focused sounds.
There are many sampled voices too – some evoking the wildness of Africa, and other something less well-defined. These samples are like digital ghosts – musical spirits summoned to the feast, in the service of sorcery. The last two tracks, “Equinoctial” – with Ichiko Aoba’s ethereal voice, and “Mercury” in which Kanako Yamamoto plucks strings reminiscent of a Japanese koto. Much of the album seduces because the music is almost without edges, ambient and yet eminently – though softly – danceable. A stress-free trip through exotic soundscapes, through which we are lured with delightful skill and constant but unshowy invention.
