Around about the same time last year, Bicep released their second album Isles in the midst of yet another lost-count lockdown.
Although their self-titled debut had been wall-to-wall bangers, its follow-up was more austere, subtly architected for consumption wherever the listener wanted it.
This conscious ambiguity reflected that ‘dance’ music, for want of a better term, with its purpose of fueling shared joy and collective hedonism has been impacted more at an experiential level by events than almost any other kind; if you can’t feel it in your ears, gut, and brain, is it really there?
As Bonobo, Simon Green is a veteran with a catalogue going back over 20 years but whose understated success came in appealing to a diverse bunch of the movement’s often cliquey tribes; it’s critically evidenced by 3 Grammy nominations, commercially so by a Top 5 spot for 2017’s Migration.
For some years an LA resident, he’s declared Fragments the most emotionally intense record he’s ever created, one he felt compelled to make.
The motivation for that is the same that forced him, Bicep, and many other artists of a similar path to recalibrate; the purpose of his and their music is essentially communal and optimistic – and being cut off from seeing how it lands with an audience was discombobulating in the extreme.
Fragments is a reaction to that, the creative genesis of which lay in a set of bold collaborations which included classical harpist Lara Somogyi, singers like Jamila Woods, Joji, Kadhja Bonet, producer O’Flynn and fellow City of Angels resident Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, who contributed the album’s majestic string arrangements.
Fusing cinematic tones, bass sounds, 2-Step, rave and even a Bulgarian choir, it’s a work which thematically addresses the times but isn’t daunted by them; Shadows, with its refrain ‘Save me from the unknown’, is warm in its uncertainty, whilst the wispy house of Rosewood pushes the BPM to the red zone; this is made to make bodies move, to be embraced.
It’s a statement, a call which finds a response is the haunted garage beats of Sapien and Closer’s urgent pickup, whilst From You echoes the trippy futuristic R&B of Frank Ocean, and Counterpart bubbles with the vogueish shades of acid house.
Green himself sees the main chapters as Tides – with Jamila Woods’ calm and sensual vocals giving the track a deep sense of profoundness and aching melancholy – and Otomo, complete with its sampled choristers, may be one of Bonobo’s finest tracks ever, as the old and the new meld together to a point from which the latter picks up the torch. It’s a stunning track where that phrase is so often contemporarily overused.
In many ways, Fragments charts the redemptory, soul-searching journey which every serious player in this field has had to make in the last two years.
For Green, the personal catharsis began whilst on an unofficial pilgrimage to himself in the vast, overheated deserts of Utah, one from which he returned with a renewed sense of perspective.
With this behind him – and many others – a more sympathetic and durable kind of music is emerging, one with an awareness of people and places and a need to mean more than one thing to an audience searching for answers to new questions.
Fragments is a record that embraces this change, made by someone who didn’t choose the role of pioneer but has accepted it anyway – and in doing so has shifted the needle, wherever fate’s dial is now going to point to.
