100 Quotes by Bonobo

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.

In the very beginning, I kind of had this hip-hop, cut-and-paste approach to music. The first record, especially, was from looking at people like DJ Shadow and A Tribe Called Quest, and I think a phase that a lot of people go through when they start sampling is to go out and stamp on twigs and try to record that kind of stuff.

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.

As a club DJ, it's more about the room and the whole immersive experience of the club. In a live show, the focus is on the stage. It's more of a performance, more of a spectacle.

I really enjoy DJing but I couldn't DJ exclusively. I couldn't produce exclusively either, that would involve spending a lot of time in isolation. But l do enjoy performing the music l create to people. It's a release for me.

When I made my first record, I was very naive, and I didn't know much about production, and I had a very basic amount of equipment, and I was just digging through vinyl for samples in a very old-fashioned way. It was very loop-based and very cut and paste, and that's the way I started out.

For me, I really like listening to music really loud.

You really only have to use one half of your brain when you're deejaying.

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.