You're listening to Song Exploder,
where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made.
I'm Rishikesh Hirway.
Simon Green is a producer and DJ who's been making music under the name Bonobo since 2000.
In January 2017, he released his sixth album, Migration.
For the song Break Apart on that album, he enlisted Rye for vocals.
And in this episode, the two of them tell the story of how the track came together.
My name is Simon Green, and I go under the name Bonobo.
When I first started this song, I was on a flight from Miami to LA.
It was an evening flight.
It was a bit of a weird mind space.
All I wanted at the time was just to sort of be still and stop traveling.
I spent kind of a year just living nowhere, just on tour,
just kind of in hotels and tour buses, living out of a suitcase.
I was feeling sort of tired and a little more somber so I kind of,
I pulled up Ableton and I built this patch from a plug-in,
a Korg M1 which is like the classic house piano and just drowned it in reverb and just did these very slow notes one after another looking out the window at whatever was passing down underneath.
That was the opening chord progression.
And I also had this loop, this little kind of chiming percussive loop.
I never really start out thinking this is going to be something I'm making for the record.