Amon Tobin

Bringing order to chaos. Whether or not that was the goal of Amon Adonai Santos de Araujo Tobin, the Brazilian producer based in Brighton, when he began untangling towers of samples to shape his third album for Ninja Tune, it was certainly the result he achieved. After the shape-shifting nu jazz cut-and-paste of Bricolage (1997) and “Permutation” (1998), and after the adventurous instrumental hip-hop of “Adventures In Foam” (1996), released under his earlier alias Cujo, the producer, by then twenty-eight, carried his sonic-alchemist journey through an opus-in-black stage, finally arriving at his own personal philosopher's stone: a compositional clarity that, without giving up experimentation and complexity, could give his music an unexpected melodic pull — and even some measure of commercial traction.

Solve et coagula: break sonic components down into particles so fine they become unrecognisable, then recondense them into something entirely new that nonetheless preserves — and multiplies — the aura that made you choose them as raw material in the first place. On this record, Tobin fused together dozens upon dozens of different samples, chopping and re-equalising them with extreme, almost obsessive care, to draw out the frequencies holding their magic and push everything else — everything accessory, in the dj's design — into the background. After years of tinkering, his lab had settled into a stable working setup: a Mackie D8b mixing console and an Akai S6000 sampler as his alembics, Cubase software as his athanor, and for reagent vials, stacks upon stacks of old vinyl records, at the time still largely forgotten: third-stream jazz, fusion, bossa nova, exotica, easy listening, and various knick-knacks from the days of the Moog craze…

The opening “Get Your Snack On” transfigures a saxophone theme by Sam Taylor, a drum part played by Buddy Rich on a track composed by Joe Zawinul, and a vocal fragment lifted from a live recording by bandleader Bob Crosby, yet no one — despite the expertise of the sound detectives at Whosampled.com — seems to have identified the source of the flute tumble that, right at the half-minute mark, turns the breakbeat swagger of the opening bars into the arcane evocation of a water dragon, menacing and darting.

The following, memorable “Four Ton Mantis”, evocative from the title alone, is currently missing from many major streaming platforms, likely due to royalty issues tied to a rather liberal use of samples: it can still be found on SoundCloud, and anyone in Italy who watched Mtv might get a jolt of recognition, remembering it as the theme for “Loveline” from 2001. Among the identified samples: dazzling synth dust from the Electric Moog Orchestra, a twisted flute flourish by Hermeto Pascoal, a break by bebop father figure Kenny Clarke, and above all, the deadly descending piano run lifted from a 1972 remake of Grieg's “Hall Of The Mountain King”, courtesy of classical-crossover standard-bearers Apollo 100 (who knows if the copyright strike is down to this specific inclusion: it would be surreal, given the source material dates back to the 19th century!).

Jazz and classical reworkings, vintage synthesizers, constant shifts between multiple evocative moods, intricate rhythmic interlocking and impeccable melodic care, an obsession with the period spanning the Sixties and early Seventies: if any progressive rock hater (or superfan) has started feeling their ears burn, now might be the moment to jump to “Marine Machines” and settle the matter once and for all. Here, among the confirmed sample sources are the sci-fi, thoroughly Stravinsky-esque score composed by Laurie Johnson for “First Men In The Moon” (1964) and the whimsical space-age pop of Enoch Light, who on “Song Of India” (1959) reworks Rimsky-Korsakov into a sparkling, percussive shape (further transmuted into something almost Debussy-like by Amon Tobin's skillful distillation). With its constant slippage between the aquatic and the martial, its rhythmic reversals, its enigmatic, futuristic, at times fantastical tones, the track is essentially an update, via the tools of the remix generation, of the progressive spirit that animated the Seventies that once were.

Anyone still not convinced should let the track play through “Golfer Versus Boxer”, the album's peak in terms of evocative power, and, with the following “Deo”, also in terms of rhythmic contortion. Floating harmonies reminiscent of Saint-Saëns' “Aquarium” plunge through frenetic beats bordering on Squarepusher's drill'n'bass, giving rise to a flow that winds through chimerical sensations, magical apparitions that shimmer in the air for a few instants before being swallowed by a sampledelic magma of thefts from Morricone, unsettling strings from Quincy Jones, abstract gurgles from Varèse's “Poème Electronique”, and choirs from “Tomb Raider” (!). Just as happened back when Lester Bangs interviewed Emerson Lake & Palmer, someone online mocked the producer for his omnivorous, grandiloquent kleptomania — but how short-sighted, failing to see in Tobin's incantations anything more than a slavish rehashing of other people's work.

The second half of the album — had we truly been in the Seventies, we'd have called it side two — is less dazzling, but no less inventive. Even more than the first half, it plays on collisions of opposites and suspended moods, combining a candid, lounge-style lightness with creeping unease, often edged with nervousness or ready to tip into darkness. After “Precursor”, as jittery and bouncing as only Venetian Snares can manage, the new direction begins with the swaggering gait of “Saboteur”, streaked with electronic scratches and increasingly frequent orchestral incursions — emergences from the subconscious that gradually take the shape of the cutting brass Bernard Herrmann arranged for “Citizen Kane”.

The pivot of this second half, and also its longest track, is however “Rhino Jockey”: seven and a half minutes built on a droning bass and an obsessive batucada-style rhythmic loop, which gradually swells and grows richer with cinematic textures and counterfeit orientalisms. As the artist would reveal around the time of his fourth album, “Out From Out Where”: “I've recently been getting into a lot of Bollywood soundtracks, which are really great because of their own notion of what Western music should sound like, just as skewed as Hollywood's notion of Eastern music. I'm really fascinated by the misunderstanding that creates something new. If you listen to Martin Denny and all that easy-listening music from the Fifties and Sixties, you find an idea of Hawaiian or Eastern music that's totally removed from reality, but for that very reason capable of creating a new sound. The same thing happens with Bollywood, where they have this idea of what disco, funk or soul is: it's just insane!”.

“Keepin' It Steel” likewise limps along, an almost folktronic 3+3+2 that wouldn't have been out of place on one of Four Tet's early albums, yet gains unexpected colour from cha-cha swings and shadowy orchestral flourishes. Decidedly calmer, on the other hand, is the closer “Natureland”, which dusts off Quincy Jones once more and combines him with a clarinet flourish from Benny Goodman and a slowed-down fragment of the score for “Boy On A Dolphin”, Sophia Loren's second American film: the result is the album's most classically easy-listening track, no tricks, no sleight of hand, and yet one much loved by streaming-platform listeners, for whom it ranks among the record's most played tracks.

To launch the album, the Ninja Tune website unveiled an interactive Flash environment where visitors could fiddle with the “Supermodifier”, an imaginary machine that let you mix sixteen samples, handling both their selection and their syncing, thereby experiencing what a new generation of producers, born of drum'n'bass cut-and-paste, was placing at the centre of its own creativity. In an interview given close to the album's release, the artist explained: “Music, when it's created, always borrows aspects of the past. […] Sampling, though, doesn't refer to things: it takes them — and then you have to physically alter them in order to work from them. It's a completely new approach to building sound”. In the same conversation, he was explicit about the musicians who had shaped his approach, all tied to the thriving British jazzstep/nu jazz/downtempo scene of the preceding years: T Power, Photek, Funki Porcini… Alongside them, he cited the cinema of David Lynch, Alfred Hitchcock, Dario Argento, Sergio Leone, whose atmospheres and scores had shown him the power of shifting moods and orchestral grandeur. He also confided a dream of one day making his own soundtracks: an opportunity that would arrive in 2004 with the recording of the original score for “Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell”. A project that would mark the start of a new phase for the artist, less bound to cratedigging and instead geared toward building new sound samples entirely from scratch. A sound-designer's edge that would truly come into its own starting with “Foley Room”, released in 2007, which managed to reach No. 13 on Billboard's “Electronic Albums” chart in the US, as well as No. 9 on the UK's “Dance Album Charts”.

The previous “Out From Out Where” had already managed to reach No. 32 on the UK's “Independent Albums Chart” (as well as, surprisingly, the same position on the equivalent Billboard chart!), but the dj's first album to sneak into the charts was actually “Supermodified”, which in June 2000 briefly claimed No. 39 on the “Independent Albums Chart”. A sign that the brilliant confusion refined by alchemist Amon Tobin, born of an equal mix of method and entropy, could, when it wanted to, shine like gold.

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07/07/2024