Since his downtempo heyday in the early 2000s, British producer Simon Green, AKA Bonobo, has gradually moved further into the club without ever quite leaving behind the warmth that defined his earlier work. His productions have always had a taste for the tactile, strings, horns, hand percussion, live instrumentation, often set against sleek electronic arrangements. On Distance in Static, his eighth album, that instinct takes him further afield, pulling together vocals in English, Urdu and Japanese alongside guzheng recordings and samples of Iranian music.
Among the album’s more unexpected details is Bonobo’s use of Ramesh’s “Labe Darya,” a Persian pop classic that appears across two tracks. He found the recording through an archive of Iranian music from Caltex, after a friend gave him access to the label’s catalogue. On “Shokoufeh,” he takes Ramesh’s vocal and stretches and re-pitches her phrases until they sit naturally inside his own hazy electronic palette. Her voice remains recognisable, but the processing gives it a strange new elasticity, floating above warm bass, loose percussion and softly glowing synths.
“Uncasually” approaches the same source from the other end. Here, Bonobo leaves Ramesh’s voice behind and pulls out the song’s dramatic string passage instead, chopping and filtering its sweeping violin lines into a brief, cinematic interruption. Around the 1:15 mark, the electronic groove gives way to the strings for roughly half a minute, their swelling phrases creating a moment of tension before the beat slips back in. It’s a small detour, but an effective one: the old recording doesn’t simply sit on top of the production as decoration, it changes the shape of the track.
Bonobo has said that the Iranian recordings appealed to him partly because of what they reveal about the country’s musical heritage. “Shokoufeh,” he notes, draws from a song recorded before the Iranian Revolution, but one that felt increasingly relevant to revisit.
