Bonobo

“You have to engage with the current palette of the world, and what that sounds like.”

“When I was young, I wanted to take a year off from college and come to India but never got a chance.”

“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.”

“People think about L.A. as being sunny and relaxed, but there's a darker side to it. There's people living in tents under bridges in their thousands. The culture almost encourages you to look the other way.”

“Life has highs, lows, loud and quiet moments, beautiful ones and ugly ones. Music is a reflection of life.”

“I think it's good to sort of push people's expectations a little bit. I've always been doing that.”

“With something like 'Second Sun' it was something I'd never really done before. It has no drums and I think that was the first time I'd done this sort of instrumental, bass-less kind of piece.”

“When I made my first record, I was very naive, and I didn't know much about production, and I had a very basic amount of equipment, and I was just digging through vinyl for samples in a very old-fashioned way. It was very loop-based and very cut and paste, and that's the way I started out.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I record a lot of stuff on my phone when I'm out and about and regularly use the recordings in my tracks.”

“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.”

“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.”

“When I started touring and coming to San Francisco, especially, I felt the most at home in America, other than in New York.”

“Most of the time I approach a track as series of experiments: seeing what fits, and trying to manipulate sounds into each other so they have some kind of dialogue, and then start building a structure around it.”

“For me, the energy when I'm DJ'ing should be about the dance floor and not about the person performing.”

“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 like messing around with sounds.”

“When I was 16 I was in a neo hardcore band called Finger Charge. I played the drums with my shirt off.”

“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.'”