Bonobo's 'Kerala'

13:2 Autumn 19 MSMI https://doi.org/10.3828/msmi.2019.9 Living with Time-Space Compression: Bonobo’s ‘Kerala’ and ‘No Reason’ STE V EN SH AV IRO Living with Time-Space Compression Bonobo’s 2017 album Migration is about shifting identities and passages from place to place: the migratory movement of bodies through space and time. The music blends multiple styles and sonic motifs from around the world in order to produce a cosmopolitan vision of multiple cultures, mutually influencing one another and coexisting in harmony. But the music videos for several of the tracks on this album – particularly Dave Bullivant’s video for ‘Kerala’ and Oscar Hudson’s video for ‘No Reason’ – tease out and complicate our sense of what is at stake in the processes of globe-spanning migration. Under the regime of globalised capitalism, not all substances transport themselves in time and through space with the same degree of ease. Financial capital passes quickly and seamlessly over the entire globe, while human bodies are all too often boxed in, shut out or even exterminated. Bullivant and Hudson both use strikingly innovative formal means in order to explore the blockages in time and space that underlie and qualify Bonobo’s utopian vision. The British electronic producer known as Bonobo (Simon Green) released his album Migration in 2017. The album’s music is grounded in midtempo dance rhythms, but its sonic palette is diversified with touches of (so-called) ‘world music’. With such a soundscape, Bonobo might well be accused of musical tourism or colonialism. But I am willing to accept at face value Bonobo’s claim that the album is not primarily engaged in appropriating cool sounds from the developing world. Rather, as its title indicates, Migration is concerned with passages from one place to another. Bonobo is more interested in shifting identities, and especially in the process of transit itself, than he is in identifying, or appropriating and laying claim to, fixed styles, and fixed points of origin and destination. He says that he is fascinated by ‘how one person will take an influence from one part of the world and move with that influence and affect another part of the world. Over time, the identities of places evolve’ 148 13:2 Autumn 19 MSMI Steven Shaviro ♦ Living with Time-Space Compression (‘Migration, by Bonobo’, 2017). Bonobo’s music traces and enacts these fluctuating processes, rather than revelling in exoticism for its own sake. At a time when politicians in the United States, Britain, and Europe are cynically manipulating anti-immigrant hysteria, I can only welcome Bonobo’s celebration of open borders. Nonetheless, I cannot help feeling that the music in Migration is a bit bland. The problem is not so much that Bonobo appropriates from so many non-Western sources, as that he does not seem to do anything compelling or distinctive with these appropriations. The textures are varied, but the overall effect is still fairly indifferent. One pseudonymous reviewer cruelly – but not to my mind inaccurately – describes Migration as ‘a melodically pleasant electronica record that completely blends together towards the beginning and never really shows any unique musical charac- teristics’ (Zabboo, 2017). This all changes, however, when we consider Bonobo’s music videos. Four of the twelve tracks in Migration have been given video treatments; there are actually five videos overall, because one of the songs (‘Break Apart’) has been made into a video twice. All these videos are unique, provocative, and powerfully expressive – in a way that (to my mind at least) the music by itself is not. The five videos also resonate strongly with one another, even though they are all made by different directors. None of the videos feature Simon Green himself, nor display any sort of musical performance. Rather, they are all more or less abstract; they either lack narratives altogether or place their human figures into stories that are fragmented and enigmatic at best. Most of them feature understated, but still disturbing, visual anomalies. They are all edited in ways that not only call our attention to the rhythms and textures of the music, but also make these rhythms and textures stand out in higher and more explicitly varying profiles. The great theorist of film sound Michel Chion famously writes about how sound temporalises and vectorises the cinematic image (Chion, 2019); but in Bonobo’s post-cinematic videos it is more the case that moving images temporalise and vectorise what would otherwise be a fairly static soundtrack. It is in these videos, rather than through sound alone, that Bonobo reaches his full measure as an artist. This makes sense for a music that is more orientated towards blissing us out (synesthetic absorption and mental travel) than towards making our bodies writhe on the dance floor. We know that music resonates in time and space, and that perception is multimodal, or at least implicitly synesthetic. Digital production accentuates these tendencies, both because it encodes sounds and images alike in ones and zeroes, and because it allows for the ready combination of contents that, as Bonobo says, ‘originally had nothing to do with each other’ (‘Bonobo: The Path 13:2 Autumn 19 MSMI 149 Steven Shaviro ♦ Living with Time-Space Compression to Migration’, 2016). Digital production allows for the ready migration of sonic and visual elements, their displacement from one setting or context to another. In this way, digital production provides an analogue for – or better, it gives an idealised aesthetic form to – the migratory movement of bodies through space and time that Bonobo celebrates. Bonobo’s visual collaborators tease out the ways that music is an art of time and duration, which works by passing through and permeating volumes of space. The music videos unfold, and make explicit, the implicit multidimensionality of Bonobo’s musical tracks. All five of theMigration videos do this to a greater or lesser extent. But in what follows, I will focus on the two most intense and perplexing of these videos: ‘Kerala’ directed by Bison aka Dave Bullivant, and ‘No Reason’ directed by Oscar Hudson. Bullivant and Hudson are both accomplished video directors of a decidedly experimental bent. In their work for Bonobo, they respec- tively explore the paradoxical formations of time (‘Kerala’) and space (‘No Reason’) in Bonobo’s music. In their different ways, Bullivant’s and Hudson’s visualisations of Bonobo’s soundscapes tease out and complicate our sense of what is at stake in the processes of globe-spanning migration. In the twenty- first century, we do not experience time and space as being even and homogeneous. Time does not flow uniformly, but knots up, stutters and repeats, and jumps irregularly. Space is not smooth and continuous, but lumpy and cluttered, and folded and stretched out, densified at some places and rarefied at others. Migration, or the movement through space over the course of time, is therefore not an easy and open flow. It is continually being interrupted, impeded and redirected, or even pushed back against itself. Not all substances transport themselves in time and through space with the same degree of ease: financial capital passes quickly and seamlessly over the entire globe, while human bodies are all often boxed in, shut out, or even exterminated. As I write these lines, the British Home Secretary has just announced, with an air of jubilant self-congratulation, her intention ‘to end the free movement of people once and for all’ (‘Priti Patel’, 2019). Where Bonobo’s album expresses a utopian hope for free movement, Bullivant’s and Hudson’s videos offer us allegories for the vicious, actually existing impediments to this hope. ‘Kerala’ ‘Kerala’ can best be described as midtempo electronica (125 bpm); it is in a minor key, but fairly bright and relaxed. It is an instrumental track, in 4/4 time, mostly strings and percussion, with wordless vocals added in the second half (a repeated ‘hey yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah’ 150 13:2 Autumn 19 MSMI Steven Shaviro ♦ Living with Time-Space Compression sampled from the chorus of Brandy’s 1994 song ‘Baby’). ‘Kerala’ starts out sparse, but becomes increasingly dense as instrumental layers are added, one at a time. These layers occasionally stutter or syncopate, but usually stay on the beat. The samples wash through the song in repeating loops, perhaps invoking the ebb and flow of (not very funky) dancing. At the same time, the piece’s changing textures do suggest a limited degree of narrative progression. As the sounds thicken, a simple two-chord alternation is fleshed out into an almost-melody. Bonobo avoids the dramatic soars and drops of mainstream EDM; but the song does build in intensity, with occasional lighter interludes. There is no climax, however; rather, the track ends with an extended coda, allowing its energy to slowly dissipate. All in all, ‘Kerala’ walks a fine line between putting the listener into a hypnotic trance and sounding, well, cheerily chintzy. Why does the track have this particular title? Kerala is a state in southwest India. It is best known, internationally, for the fact that it has been under Communist Party rule for most of the past sixty years, and that it has flourished economically and culturally as a result. Indeed, Kerala has the highest Human Development Index, the highest literacy rate and the highest life expectancy of any state in India (‘Kerala’, n.d.). Bonobo says in an interview, however, that he named the track not for political reasons, but because the state is an important stopping place for birds from North Asia, migrating south for the winter (O’Connor, 2017). Migration, as a global phenomenon, includes, but is not restricted to, human beings.

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