Bonobo

I've always wanted to do a big theater show in San Francisco.

Ninja has definitely kind of changed its identity since it first started out. Ninja back in the day was always turntables and jazz and sampling and electronica. But over time, it's become quite diverse and open to songwriting in a variety of forms.

Life has highs, lows, loud and quiet moments, beautiful ones and ugly ones. Music is a reflection of life.

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

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

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.

I was in bands when I was younger, and that's a lot of the reason I started working solo - it was always a compromise.

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.

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.

Four Tet is somebody I respect a lot. There are other artists I admire like jazz pianist and composer Marc Moulin.

Erykah Badu sang with me at a sold out show in San Francisco which was great.

Having the opportunity to see cool places all over the world is fun.

When I was young, I wanted to take a year off from college and come to India but never got a chance.

Ninja was able to survive its own hype and become a very strong label.

When I started touring and coming to San Francisco, especially, I felt the most at home in America, other than in New York.

There was an immediate connection with the Bay Area from when I first came out years ago. Somehow, I always knew there would be. They embraced me as a sort of honorary San Franciscan for some reason.

I respond to creativity well when I'm outside and reacting to experiences, not inside a studio.

Every record I've made, I've mixed and engineered at home.

I come from a film background as I studied film at art school.

People think about L.A. as being sunny and relaxed, but there's a darker side to it. There's people living in tents under bridges in their thousands. The culture almost encourages you to look the other way.

Towards the end of touring 'The North Borders' I had a lot of personal stuff going on - family members who had died - and I was feeling displaced.

I struggle with arrangements. I take forever doing them. It gets to a point where I've been playing around with things on loops for days. I always paint in broad strokes - very quickly, I'll feel out the larger structure - but it's putting the details in that I find the hardest part.

I'm just a music fan.

I think I've always had this thing where it's music first.

If you're in a current mind state where you know what you want from the track, you can't just leave it and expect to come back with the same mindset.

With something like 'Second Sun' it was something I'd never really done before. It has no drums and I think that was the first time I'd done this sort of instrumental, bass-less kind of piece.

You know, the one thing I've learnt or value from back in the day is the restraint and discipline you get when you're limited by technology and equipment.

I've spent a lot of time in Montreal, it's one of my favorite cities in the world.

Yeah, I'd definitely love to do some scores someday. I particularly love Hans Zimmer's work.

Albums are just a punctuation of music. I don't usually start out with a manifesto. Your tastes change with the process of the album. I just make music and put it out when there's enough to call it an album.

That's when things get exciting - when you're outside the comfort zone, trying different things.

I think on every album, I keep experimenting to go where I haven't been before.

With places like Spotify and YouTube broadcasting these days, you get a track made in San Francisco broadcasting in London moments later, so it's more global now.

I don't really write music in the traditional sense of chorus, verse. It's more experimental sounding. The process comes from an experimentation with noise.

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.

I often find there's an equal benefit to being in a comfortable, well rested studio session, but also the more pressured headspace of being in an airport or working at 7 A.M., fresh from the club with the music still ringing in your ears.

Outlier' came together pretty quickly. There's no real telling why that happens, sometimes the thing is just more intricate and takes longer you know, there's actual labour to be done in terms of sound design whereas other things are much freer.

When DJing works and the room is with you then it's one of the most enjoyable things you can do.

It's hard for me to use any electronic sounds at all, really. I'm always just layering acoustic sounds.

I used to go to Glastonbury when I was young back in the '90s, back when you could jump the fence.

If something is done really well then the question of live vs. DJ vs. instruments vs. drum machines doesn't matter - it's all just about taste, really.

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.

DJ-ing taught me how to create a journey over the space of two or three hours.

I'm always just referencing whatever I'm listening to or wherever I am musically.

Out on the West Coast, I learned to snowboard in Whistler, and I've been to festivals in British Columbia, and played in Toronto so many times I can't remember each one. Montreal too, is just one of my favourite cities on earth. I've played in Calgary, Winnipeg, Saskatoon.

A lot of music is like a diary for me.

I feel like Canada's almost a second home at this point.

I listen to records I made years ago and it takes me back to that time, so why not actually put a bit of the life that you're living at the time into the music?

I'm not keen on terms like 'lounge' or 'chill out.'

There were a lot of labels in the '90s that were fashionable for a time and then crashed.