Bonobo

A decade into his career, Simon Green's ear has sharpened to a degree that rivals anyone's. Black Sands sparkles with dozens of tiny details but you never lose their outlines; Green's structures are shapely but feel loosely draped. On "1009" you certainly notice the way parts of the percussion gently shift timbre, the roundness of the low end, the dry slurp of some of the filtering—it's easy to hear it strictly as a piece of production. But for all its fleeting, phantom touches, a simple underlying keyboard riff keeps it legible from a distance, and enticing. Green has steadily increased the amount of real-time instrumentation over his career, and it helps make Black Sands occupy a room as smartly as it does a pair of headphones.

Green isn't stuck in some mythical head-nodding 1995, though. "Kiara" is a good example: the bass's centrality to the mix is a given, but it's got an infrared glow that makes it feel closer to a modern dubstep (or even wonky) track, and an occasional blipping keyboard pattern has a distinctly purple-via-Joker feel to it. Not that "Kiara" couldn't have been released (and fit in nicely) in 1995. It's just that Green seems interested in right now, which is maybe why he sounds so good in it.