Sole vision: Bonobo has quietly become the biggest act in dance music today

It doesn’t take a genius to see how that nomadic life led to the themes and sounds of ‘Migration’. In a sense, it’s a continuation of what Green has done throughout his career: live instruments and sophisticated electronics woven together into balmy, luxurious textures – but emotionally it’s the deepest, strangest record he’s made yet, with all of the house, jazz, funk, and global influences from his DJ sets hidden just beneath the surface, the connections between them creating a very personal perspective. It has a weightless feel that absolutely chimes with Green’s descriptions of being rootless, yet just when you’re least expecting it hits hard with a gut-level emotional punch. He’s “really contented” with where he is now, though, he says: settled in LA, and plugged into the club world there, and happy with a modern music scene that has a place for him and peers like Four Tet and Jon Hopkins.

At the DJ gig a bunch of Green’s friends from the old days in Brighton are dancing by the side of the stage, laughing affectionately about the different expressions of the cult of Bonobo. French fans consider his music to be ultra sexy, they say, while the Americans need to know every detail about it. Meanwhile, Green himself just keeps on keeping on: never pushing the tempo, just allowing one steady groove after another to feed the energy of the crowd, the likes of Talking Heads’ ‘Once In A Lifetime’ and Curtis Mayfield’s ‘Pusher Man’ blended into the deeper electronic sounds. The hardcore at the front continue to go spare every time a Bonobo tune is dropped, but just as importantly the crowd behind them keep milling and dancing just like at a proper party. Dammit, it is a proper party. Si Green might be riding the wave of one of the biggest and more unlikely successes in modern music, but in a sense nothing has changed in 16-plus years. The dancers who want to get down to funk at 3am in a warehouse are still “his people”. He’s still theirs.

Bonobo’s ‘Migration’ album is out now on Ninja Tune