Quotes from Bonobo

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

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

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.

Four Tet is somebody I respect a lot. There are other artists I admire like jazz pianist and composer Marc Moulin.

I feel like Canada's almost a second home at this point.

Albums are a journey, and I even find that as a DJ, with less than two hours, I can barely communicate anything. So I like to play long sets.

I got to Brighton in the late 90s and discovered samplers. Suddenly, I could be my own band with a guitar and sampler, getting my drums in charity shop records. It was better than bashing around in someone's basement, trying to compromise ideas.

It's one of those things that always astounds me, when I make a record and it connects with people.

Yeah, it's a kind of weird thing because I don't define myself as an electronic musician. It's certainly a part of it, and you know I have a band as well, and we go on a tour bus like other bands.

Out on the West Coast, I learned to snowboard in Whistler, and I've been to festivals in British Columbia, and played in Toronto so many times I can't remember each one. Montreal too, is just one of my favourite cities on earth. I've played in Calgary, Winnipeg, Saskatoon.

If there was just music without any genres, then people would look at a lot of things afresh, and approach a record without any preconceptions.

I often find there's an equal benefit to being in a comfortable, well rested studio session, but also the more pressured headspace of being in an airport or working at 7 A.M., fresh from the club with the music still ringing in your ears.

A lot of music is like a diary for me.

Albums are just a punctuation of music. I don't usually start out with a manifesto. Your tastes change with the process of the album. I just make music and put it out when there's enough to call it an album.

Outlier' came together pretty quickly. There's no real telling why that happens, sometimes the thing is just more intricate and takes longer you know, there's actual labour to be done in terms of sound design whereas other things are much freer.

I think on every album, I keep experimenting to go where I haven't been before.

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.

I do really long DJ sets - I play for five or six hours sometimes - but the live shows are a bit more compact. The arch of how to tell a story, where the energy is, where you have peaks and drops, where things go up and things come down, that's all being informed by DJ-ing.

Fifty percent of what I've worked on is never going to get heard, but I think the important thing is just working.

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.

I listen to records I made years ago and it takes me back to that time, so why not actually put a bit of the life that you're living at the time into the music?

You can't live in the times that you live in and be exposed to all the new music that's happening, ignore it all, and carry on doing the same stuff as you were ten years ago.

I'm not keen on terms like 'lounge' or 'chill out.'

I don't make personality-driven music. Personality stagnates, people become tired of it. When it is purely about the music, that is what gives it longevity.