Amon Tobin
Building Something Out Of Everything
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British producer Amon Tobin's Permutations was one of those landmark albums of '90s electronica that alarmingly few people heard. Subtle, yet intense, with chilled-out beats and dark, lush tones, Permutations damn near re-invented jazz for the post-acoustic age.
In Tobin's sonic collages, drum 'n' bass mixes seamlessly with jazz and hip-hop. Mining the original recordings -- vinyl crackle and all -- of Big Band legends such as Buddy Rich and Gene Krupa, Tobin chopped and spliced the jazzy drum breaks into fine snippets, then laboriously reassembled them into his own shifting, freewheeling rhythms. It's a work of artistry that is adroit and complex, yet devoid of virtuosity's bombastic trappings.
Now, after almost two years, Tobin is putting the finishing touches on Supermodified (due stateside May 16), his third studio album for London-based label Ninja Tune. To hear him explain it, the new album differs from Permutations in that it deals less with finding "the groove" and more with sound manipulation. But true to form, Tobin's flirtation with jazz, hip-hop, dub and drum 'n' bass has, if anything, expanded into full-fledged heavy-petting.
Like many electronic musicians trying to push the medium and its instruments to the next level, Tobin took inspiration from drum 'n' bass, that much-maligned genre of dance music that flittered in and out of vogue during the late '90s.
"I think there's still good (drum 'n' bass) stuff to be found, it's just getting harder and harder to find it," Tobin says. "The music went through stages of becoming so made for the DJ -- the DJ became a big sort of star in drum 'n' bass particularly. I think a lot of the music lost the focus where it wasn't on the music anymore, it was on what DJ was playing, and I think it suffered because of that."
When the genre, which mushroomed as an anti-dance reaction to the static 4/4 beats of house music, began to splinter into sub-genres while appropriating the very conventions it originally rejected, the music lost its revolutionary quality.
"A lot of it became very formulaic, the whole two-step thing (for example)," Tobin laments. "It's a shame because it so broke the mold when it first arrived, and it broke all these rules. That was what was so exciting about it. And then suddenly for it
to then surround itself with all these new rules - 'This is hard-step, this is two-step, this is intelligent,' you know, whatever -- it just seemed to be so destructive. It became trapped in its own definitions."
But Tobin, buoyed by an unflinching knack for genre shifting, has been able to escape unscathed from drum 'n' bass' big bang and ensuing big crunch.
"I feel a bit disillusioned about it, just because it had so much promise, but then I never strictly made drum 'n' bass anyway," Tobin says. "I was always into taking the aspects I loved about it and making something of my own out of it. So it's still really important and relevant to me because of that."
For Tobin, who was born in Rio de Janeiro but educated in England, music is a universal culture. His musical philosophy stresses the present over origins, and regards all music with a playful irreverence, it matters little where you come from or whether you were down with a scene from the beginning.
And in his opinion, music journalists who obsess over his Brazilian connection miss the boat entirely. "So much is made of where you come from and what your roots are," Tobin says, "and not enough attention is paid to where you're actually going."
To be fair, it should be pointed out that Tobin began fooling around with the guitar and other instruments as a teen, although it wasn't until he discovered the sampler that he really developed into a musician.
"I found the sampler to be a really honest instrument," Tobin admits. "An instrument I could use to take elements from music I loved but which I had no cultural connection to -- like blues. It let me make music that used blues and not feel like a blues charlatan who was like some white guy with his guitar, who's got nothing to do with the time or the culture or anything, living in England playing blues. It didn't make sense. Whereas sampling a genuine piece of blues and then making it into something that's your own is totally different. It's something that makes sense to me and is much more straight forward."
After flirting with photojournalism in college, Tobin decided to devote himself fully to music. His first recording was for the British label Ninebar under the pseudonym Cujo. After a handful of singles established the producer in the British electronic movement known as abstract hip-hop, Ninja Tune came calling.
Like labelmates Luke Vibert, Funki Porcini and Coldcut, Tobin cares less about making cultural connections with his music than the end result.
"Even if you don't have anything to do with, say, Indian music or Brazilian music, it does have associations and it does have meanings for you wherever you are, right?" Tobin asks rhetorically. "So it's as relevant to you as it is to someone else, just in a different way. That's what sampling is all about. It's about showing how you can make things that make sense to you out of all the things you come across from different cultures."
"It doesn't mean you have to be an anthropologist or a world traveler or anything, you just have to have a feeling for music in general," he continues. "If you're about making cultural references, it's a different matter. But I'm interested purely in the sonics. There are so many similarities in these instruments around the world and they shouldn't really be kept apart because people don't feel qualified to use the sitar."
In his own self-deprecating way, Tobin has eloquently defined the most significant musical revolution to take place in the last half of the 20th century. The democratization of sound, brought on by advances in technology and musical equipment, have allowed a whole new generation of bedroom noodlers to become musicians. Freed from learning to play traditional instruments like guitar or piano, electronic musicians can devote their time to manipulating sound in ways never before possible. With the moon already mapped and navigated, and manned missions to Mars still light-years away, music may be the true Final Frontier.
While there will always be the diehards and Luddites who say electronic music is nothing more than glorified pastiche, those willing to embrace the experimental and "out-there" sonic pioneers will find a wealth of talented musical thinkers capable of creating new connections out of the ordinary and mundane.
Take, for example, Tobin's labelmates Kid Koala and Money Mark, who layer swirling keyboard melodies over the rat-a-tat-tatting of an honest-to-goodness manual typewriter. It's this willingness to experiment, and perhaps a little dorkiness, that drives progress in any field.
Over the years, Tobin has surpassed most of his sampler-weilding peers in sheer virtuosity. Take, for instance, the track "Nightlife," on Permutations, whose Disney-esque majesty of strings, flutes and woodwinds invokes nostalgia for 1950s-era cartoons.
"I think music is very good at making you think of a whole type of film with just one sound," Tobin says. "That's something I got into more with this record, is getting harps and clarinets, sounds that are pretty Disney-esque, and these sort of 1940s, 1950s recordings, and putting them into a very sci-fi musical environment and seeing what happens."
What has, in fact, "happened" is the coalescing of another dense musical hybrid. Supermodified comes across like the moody cousin of Permutations, with slinky beats and cool horns floating through a thick fog of distortion.
For Tobin, it's less about the brains behind the music than the visceral nature of the
listening experience. If you scratch your head, that's great. But if you nod your head,
well, that's even better.
JAY DEFOORE |