Deconstructing Amon Tobin
Amon Adonai Santos de Araujo Tobin may not be a man of gigantic physical proportions, but behind the computer and the turntables, he’s certainly a musical heavyweight. He is also one of the most interesting electronic musicians that came to light during the past decade, with a recent release last year, titled Foley Room.
His work may not be climbing the charts, and maybe his music isn’t the easiest to listen to, especially in a time when the interest in electronic music has diminished, in favor of post-rock and indie pop. But letting his work pass you by is missing out on an artist who can make music out of almost anything – even a kitchen sink.
The man behind the samples
Amon Tobin was born in 1972 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. At an early age, his parents settled in the United Kingdom, where young Tobin would grow up, and immerse himself into such different music scenes as jazz, hip hop, jungle and blues. His surname Tobin is borrowed from his Irish stepfather. Knowing no boundaries in terms of music or nationalities, in recent years Tobin has relocated to Montreal, where he lives in an industrial area, as not to disturb his neighbors when making music. Nevertheless, in interviews, Tobin admits that he is Brazilian in his heart, even if he didn’t live in Brazil for a long time.
His music is so elaborated that somewhere, a rumor started, claiming that Amon Tobin didn’t use instruments to make music, something that read literally meant that he didn’t work with actual musicians. Word said that he sampled everything, and that he transformed ambient sounds into music. This is a myth that has been explained by Tobin himself: indeed, he works with musicians and instruments, the very basis of melody. What happens is that Tobin samples melodies and musical instruments, and uses them to make music. The only truth about this rumor has to do with the fact that he also samples ambient sounds, but distorts and manipulates them in order to create new sounds to insert in songs. That’s why in his most recent album Foley Room, there is a song called Kitchen Sink: the origin of most of it comes from real kitchen sink sounds.
The constant moving around can offer a clue to what Tobin’s music is all about: an amalgamation of jazz, rhythm and sounds one can’t describe, that fill his songs in a very peculiar way. Somehow, we are before the man who controls the machine, and who makes it somewhat human, going beyond the mere addition of sound, and adding a personal component – this is the direction Tobin’s work has recently been taking. But there is a peculiar evolution that an interested listener should know about, that starts when Amon Tobin was, in fact, Cujo.
Cujo’s Adventures in Foam, Amon Tobin’s Bricolage and Permutations
Amon Tobin’s first released album is titled Adventures in Foam, published under the pseudonym Cujo, in 1996. Much into the electronic wave that sprouted around that time (trip hop and drum n’ bass), Adventures in Foam is a sound adventure where Tobin mixes jazz bass sounds with drum n’ bass rhythms. But, if you listen to this album, you’ll realize that this one-sentence description is too simple, and even if it outlines the base for Tobin’s work, it does not make justice to the work the musician has put into Adventures in Foam.
A master of sound layering, Tobin adds a dry and mechanical taste into the warmness that usually defines jazz, and these characteristics don’t come from the hard beats of jungle and drum n’ bass. On the contrary: these rhythms melt in an amazing perfection with Tobin’s jazz base. No, the weird feeling that the listener gets from Adventures in Foam comes from the mix of other sampling sounds that Tobin adds to the music, completing the simple superimposing of melody and rhythm.
The same year, Amon Tobin is signed by electronic label Ninja Tune and goes on to release several other albums with his name, being the first of these works Bricolage (1997). The title of this album is an irony of sorts, referring to Tobin’s work with sampling: the same way a person assembles a piece of furniture from pieces of wood or plastic, so does Tobin assemble songs from bits and pieces of sounds he finds around. The result, much similar to Adventures in Foam, is heavily based on jazz and dry, drum n’ bass rhythms, with the inclusion of some Brazilian instruments, such as the yucca or some percussion samples.
1998 sees the release of Permutations, following the lines of Tobin’s previous albums. In this case, there is a variety of rhythms, with Tobin leaving behind the drum n’ bass he so comfortably handled, moving onto territories more familiar to DJ Shadow, for example. Nevertheless, those early rhythm options still resound throughout Permutations, and one can declare that this album marks the beginning of what would be a new stage in Amon Tobin’s work, inaugurated with Supermodified.
Supermodified: when Amon Tobin rebelled against ambient sound music
In 2000, Amon Tobin released Supermodified, an album whose title does have a pun intended. If his previous works were quite experimentalist, but somehow fit to play as music, either on the dance floor or as background music, in Supermodified, there is a departure from this easiness. Tobin creates songs which are energetic, powerful, jazzy in essence, but profoundly disturbing. This is the moment when Amon Tobin departs from the established “trip hop”, “drum n’ bass” and “electronic” labels, and moves on to create his own space, with conceptualist songs and unbelievable sounds.
Two years after Supermodified, Ninja Tune releases Out from Out Where. This is an album in which Tobin further explores the concept music laid in Supermodified: some songs are more melodic, but Tobin manages to scramble the cards and deal again, all in the same song. Take Rosies, for example: this song begins with a pleasant melody, quite upbeat and, all of a sudden, it is hijacked by a reverb rhythm that makes the melody fade so much into the background that you actually forget what you were listening to.
Splinter Cell soundtrack and Foley Room: Amon Tobin Morricone?
In 2005, Amon Tobin was invited by Ubisoft to score the Chaos Theory – Splinter Cell 3 videogame, something which proved to be an opportunity for Tobin to go into uncharted waters: composing soundtracks. Even if his previous works were not soundtracks per se, the fact is that his music was very much the expression of subconscious feelings, some of them quite dark and scary.
Therefore, 2007’s Foley Room is an album that evokes that feeling of cinematographic landscapes, even if some of the songs are as deconstructed and conceptualist as Amon Tobin can make them.
The opening track Bloodstone is chilling: the Kronos Quartet contributed with a string melody that Tobin manages to distort, unexpectedly, with rhythm by the end of the song. And what about the infamous Kitchen Sink? Well, turning a broken, dripping faucet into a work of art is brilliant, and definitely deserves one’s attention.
>Written by d/visible contributor Mariana Passos E Sousa.
