Living with Time-Space Compression: Bonobo’s ‘Kerala’ and ‘No Reason’

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.