Bonobo warmed up the Movement Stage before Skrillex on the festival's final night

Bonobo played Movement on the festival's final night in 2023, and the slot was a setup, not a sendoff.

Simon Green, who has recorded and toured as Bonobo since the late 1990s on the Ninja Tune label, took the Movement Stage on Monday, May 29, the Memorial Day close of the three-day festival at Hart Plaza. Per the set times Paxahau published, his was a DJ set running 6:30 p.m. to 8 p.m. It fed straight into Skrillex at 8 p.m. and Underworld after that, the booking that carried the stage into the night.

That is a different role than the one Movement usually hands its Detroit techno headliners, and a different one than Bonobo plays on his own tours. Green built his reputation on full-band shows, the live setup he has carried since the Black Sands era, with strings and players filling out records like his 2022 album Fragments. None of that was on the Hart Plaza bill. At Movement he was billed as a DJ, an early-evening warm act clearing the runway for a bass-music headliner.

The Sunday-versus-Monday distinction matters for anyone reading old listings. The Movement Stage closer the night before, Sunday, May 28, was Charlotte de Witte at 10:30 p.m., following a live set from Robert Hood. Bonobo was not a closer on either night.

The booking still fit a pattern Paxahau leaned into that year. The 2023 lineup reached past Detroit techno orthodoxy toward names with crossover pull, Skrillex and Fisher among them, and a Bonobo DJ set ahead of Skrillex sat inside that wider reach. Whether a downtempo producer best known for live bands belongs in a quick festival DJ slot is a fair question. On Memorial Day 2023 it was the slot he filled.