Bonobo

Bonobo doesn’t deserve the label of a small act because his sound is much larger than that....
Bonobo

Bonobo

Bonobo, who is by no means a small fry in the electronic and chill scene, does not really have great name recognition.  Pick a person off the street and ask them what first pops into their head when you say “Bonobo” and they’ll probably ask you if that’s some kind of ape.  It’s terribly unlikely that they’ll be able to tell you about Simon Green, the down-tempo and trip-hop producer/DJ/musician.

So it’s always surprising when an act like Bonobo manages to pull a crowd like he did on Wednesday night, April 24th at The Granada in Lawrence, Kansas.  Let me repeat that: Bonobo, a U.K.-based act, with little to no name recognition, performed to a packed house in a college town in Kansas – on a work night.  Not only was it a packed house, it was a diverse house.  There were the dreadlocked stoners gathered around the sound-booth, puffing on their electronic ‘cigarettes’.  The young hipster crowd mingled with the old hipster crowd, five-panel caps and skinny jeans mixing in with thrift store button ups and curious facial hair decisions.  The free spirits danced through the crowd in big goofy sunglasses and brightly colored tights, surely on more drugs than you can count on one hand, or perhaps having taken one drug more times than you can count on two hands.  Even the regular, run of the mill, college students in t-shirts and cargo shorts were lined up at the bar for tiny plastic cups filled with booze and cola-flavored corn-syrup.

It really is surprising what a varied crowd such an obscure act managed to draw.  But once the show started, it all made sense.  Bonobo is an agile artist.  Much of his music is made from behind a computer, but the thing that makes a Bonobo show so special is how he combines button pressing with live instrumentation.  He’s a DJ, so sampling is prominent.  But the breakbeats dance with live vocals, clarinet and saxophone lines that were born in smoky jazz lounges.  The synth pads and dubbed-out bass trade blows with live drums and guitar work that can morph from Spanish-style plinking to indie noisemaking.

And all that live instrumentation is done in spectacular fashion.  Vocalist Szjerdene is elegant and mysterious.  She leads the line like a songstress from another era.  Jack Baker is a drummer from another planet.  His solo on Wednesday night stole the show, and when he and sax/clarinet/flautist Mike Lisurge took the stage together for a duet/battle, it was easy to forget that the star of the show, and the ringleader of it all, was no longer on stage.

The band played in front of a backdrop of video ‘pillars’.  On one side of the pillars were video screens, synced up to showcase a colorful backdrop that pulsed with the sounds of the show.  Some of those pillars rotated to reveal disco-ball style mirrors that reflected the light of the stage and their neighboring video-pillars to create surreal refractions of that fluttered along the sides of the Granada.  It was a sight to see; Simon Green leaning over his DJ station, calmly handling the knobs and buttons while also tending to the needs of the bass guitar strapped to his chest, Szjerdene’s dramatic silhouette cast on the south wall, the storm of drum-stick pine and brilliant flash of cymbal light from Jack Baker’s drums, and the entranced faces of the audience, dripping with the light from Bonobo’s video pillars.

Bonobo doesn’t deserve the label of a small act because his sound is much larger than that.  And although you may not be able to find any given stranger on the street that can tell you about North Shores, his latest album, if you can find someone who’s seen him live they’ll have no shortage of praise, and the red-assed bonobo monkey will be the farthest thing from their mind.

Categories
Concert Reviews
  • Anonymous
    at
  • No Comment

    Leave a Reply

    Album of the Week