Bonobo live at Vicar St: 12-piece tranquillity gives way to sonic upheaval

Simon Green’s live ensemble unintentionally serves as a subliminal advertisement for festival season. Slightly more stripped back than their previous 12-piece incarnations, they still entice with their trademark slow-burning transition from tranquillity to sonic upheaval. This is somewhat predictable but not unwelcome; it’s a rewarding drop for the audience when Green vaguely aloof demeanor softens with warm greetings and hearty, heavy sounds.

Halfway through Bonobo's third track, the band members jump ship and leave Green alone to trigger samples and carry the bass for Towers. The crowd responds to this with a giddy mania as though they have transformed into one big hive mind that uniformly fancies him. When the rest of his group return in gradual instalments, they intersperse snippets of this year's album Migration with Black Sands hallmarks, melting old and new together smoothly.

The visual backdrop marries documental landscape footage with luminous geometric shapes appearing across them, and has the effect of a modern-day Stanley Kubrick film. It’s revitalising to see an act so immersed in playing their older catalogue, bringing a fresh kick to songs they’ve been touring for more than six years.

Meanwhile, the in-house sound engineer is clearly a graduate of sonic-wizard school, because every note is golden. Both clarinet and flute resonate clearly beside the double brass, imitating studio perfection in real time. It's nice to pick out the flautists as they lose the head when the Cirrus flute solo drops. Every other minimal-to-big-band transition goes off without a hitch - no player gets lost in a clamorous wall of sound.

Green thanks the audience for making a Monday evening feel like Friday night, which they appreciate deeply. It’s nice that he values a hooley as much as they do. When he explains that he’s glad to be in Dublin after a series a of “logistical mishaps” nearly called the gig off, the crowd respond with a hail of condemnatory booing, despite his best efforts to remind them he is currently performing. But hey cheer up when he plays out on some warehouse-level refrains backed with synchronised strobes and video images of bog-like terrain .

Some element of Bonobo feels loosely dependable, but it never comes across as formulaic. Bonobo are definitely still fresh.