Bonobo: Fabric Presents Bonobo
Fabric

Rising from the ashes of the Fabric and Fabriclive mix series, Fabric Presents starts auspiciously by placing Bonobo, aka British-born and LA-based Simon Green, at the helm. His panoramic approach makes him an excellent choice for this inaugural chapter (available in CD and double-vinyl formats), and it certainly sells the idea a whole lot better than would, say, a stripped-down mix of skeletal grooves. In some ways, it's business as usual for a mix disc—seventy-four minutes long, the set progresses episodically through twenty-two tracks, ten of them exclusives or unreleased cuts and three by Bonobo and one by another Green alias, Barakas—though that doesn't make it any the less engrossing.

A deft balance is struck between two tendencies, house on the one hand and Bonobo-styled productions that branch into jazz, soul, folk, electronica, and World genres on the other. The result, the first official Bonobo mix release since 2013's LateNightTales, both checks the requisite club boxes and expands the musical palette in texturally dazzling manner.

By initiating the recording with two of his own cuts, Bonobo establishes a resplendent tone right away. A punchy opener, “Flicker” augments its urgent snap with the sparkle of tinkling keys and strings and evokes a magical wonderland in the fullness of the production, after which honking sax figures and swishing rhythms inject “Boston Common” with jazz and house flavours. At this moment, the merging of driving club rhythms with prototypical Bonobo sound design seems like some kind of masterstroke, especially when Green goes out of his way to select non-Bonobo tracks that wend as adventurously: Alex Kassian's “Hidden Tropics” appears briefly, but its bamboo flutes quickly lodge in the ear, as do the prog-like synth melodies burrowing through Âme's chugging “Nia” and Durante's euphoric “Maia.”

Without losing momentum, the mix's global reach extends with the advent of Dark Sky & Afriquoi's sweeping “Cold Harbour,” what with its congas, kalimba, and vocal chants, though Green's also astute enough to know occasional breaks from the intensity are needed. To that end, brief, piano-inflected breakdowns dial things down during Olsen's “Femenine” though never so much that the driving thrust of the mix is negated. TSHA and Will Saul keep the thunderous vibe going with the anthemic “Sacred” and “By Your Side,” but the mix loses some degree of focus when Green follows the vocal-based R&B of Dan Kye's frothy “Focus” with a shift into the electronica territory of R. Lyle's “Perpetrator.”

In Green's defence, that lapse in focus isn't an entirely unexpected outcome when a mix contains more than twenty tracks, and it's even harder to prevent it from happening when the material ranges as widely as it does here. Whatever reservations one might have about it, the set doesn't shortchange the listener and to its credit also largely achieves a satisfying integration between a dancefloor-centric focus and Bonobo's own panoramic sensibility.

April 2019