Bonobo plays The Echo Lounge & Music Hall on Saturday, November 7 — two days after the Distance in Static Live tour opens at Emo’s in Austin, and one of the first chances American audiences get to see Simon Green’s newest production in action. That early-tour placement matters. Green has been explicit about what this run represents: “It’s probably the last go-around the track in this format. I don’t know what that will look like just yet, but it’s really about me redefining how to be a musician from here.” Show two of a farewell-format tour in a 1,000-cap room. Pay attention.
Distance in Static, due September 11 on Ninja Tune, is Green’s eighth studio album — and his most internationally assembled project to date. The production draws on historic Iranian samples and guzheng recordings, with vocals delivered in English, Urdu, and Japanese. The collaborator list includes Grammy-winning Arooj Aftab, Joy Crookes, Nilüfer Yanya, Ichiko Aoba, Nicole Miglis of Hundred Waters, Aanya Martin, and Kanako Yamamoto. Lead single “Me and You” is a club-facing track that debuted at pop-up events in London and Paris before the album was formally announced.
The live production was developed with visual director Pierre Claude — whose work has shaped stage presentations for Air, Gesaffelstein, Phoenix, and Caroline Polachek — incorporating alien landscape visuals conceived by designer Trevor Jackson. Green’s previous Fragments tour reached over 750,000 people across four continents, including a record five-night residency at London’s Royal Albert Hall. The drop to a 1,000-capacity room is a deliberate choice; The Echo is a theater-style venue where a production this precise hits differently than it does in a shed or an amphitheater, and Green is clearly framing this as an intimate goodbye to the format he’s spent years building.
Green grew up in rural Hampshire, England, shaped in part by his father’s involvement in the British folk scene, and built a catalog that sounds more organic than most live instruments. Seven Grammy nominations in the Dance/Electronic Recording category — a record tied with The Chemical Brothers and Madonna — and over 2.7 billion catalog streams speak to how that work has traveled globally. Distance in Static pushes the international scope further than any prior Bonobo record, and this live show was built to translate it.
The Echo Lounge & Music Hall is a 1,000-capacity theater at 1323 N Stemmons Fwy in Dallas, TX. For more shows across the region, check the full Dallas-Fort Worth concert calendar.
Fan presale opens June 11 at 10 a.m. local time; general on-sale is June 12 at 10 a.m. Tickets are available via the link below.