#moderncool

🖤 Minimal effort, maximum impact 🖤

Where: The commute

When: Monday morning

When Emkay (featured), the second track of The North Borders, came on I first thought "Wow, this is really the sound." Soon my thoughts then went to "But what happened to his old sound?" Finally I settled on "Does it matter?"

In discussing Bonobo's albums thus far, my comments have revolved around this idea of what is cool and how Bonobo manages to infuse his work with an aesthetic that is, strictly speaking, cool. But his work has always been backward looking at what was cool in the past and finding a way to idealize that at a time when there are so many different definitions of how to look and act to fill one's role in modern culture. Even Black Sands, as modern as it feels, features plenty of sounds and melodies that are an updated take on music from another era. I have come to expect this from Bonobo, so when I found this aspect to be missing from The North Borders, I didn't really know how to feel.  

To complicate matters, I really like this album. I recognize its brand of cool as very close to matching my own definition of the modern cool aesthetic (as far as I may be from meeting it myself). The music is sensual and thoughtful. It embodies moody artist profiles where they are standing outside, in front of a wall not smiling in some urban setting, looking chilly. It is the feeling of being alone in a crowd. It is the feeling of wanting to belong yet stay an individual. This is the essential conflict of the cool. If a man is cool in the middle of a city but no one notices, is he still cool?

I could hear hints throughout The North Borders of releases a couple years prior in the post dubstep/future garage genre by the likes of Koreless, Mount Kimbie, Jamie XX and SBTRKT, even if it doesn’t sit squarely in with the rest of them. One big difference between Bonobo and all of these relatively new artists is that he has been in the game for almost 15 years and is about that much older than them. I would never say that someone needs to stick with what they know and leave something for the next generation of producers but I think it is really interesting that an artist like himself is showing signs of influence from artists that he very well may have influenced himself with his earlier works. The great thing about an artist with so much experience trying his hand with a young and experimental genre is that he is able to put his own spin on it and do so with a great deal refinement. An odd thing happened though where by the end of the album I felt less like I was listening to Bonobo and more like I was listening to a genre, even if his corner of it is still ill defined.