Amon Tobin

title>Untitled Document

Amon Tobin

I hated electronic music. I had a battered LP of Songs of Spain, and the thin static of WBGO. I was completely satisfied, until Amon Tobin's 1997 Bricolage wafted into my bedroom and lulled me out of a dream. I had fallen asleep in mid-afternoon, after two days without resting my eyes for more than a blink. The sound entered through a window, along with a thickly moist breeze. A tungsten streetlight beamed through flailing, rain-soaked branches, casting fast-moving shadows on my dark walls. Disoriented, not knowing what time of night it was, I threw on a coat and grabbed my keys, determined to find the source.

Tobin's specialty, since he first recorded as Cujo, is mixing actual instrumentals with the long sine-wave warbles and digital clinks you expect from an electronic artist. His complex beats are driven by melodic basslines (you remember, basses, those gargantuan string instruments), in addition to frenetic drill 'n' bass. He attains all the peculiar squawks and tweets that evolve out of a long jam session, while maintaining the energy of a meth-induced Keith Moon one-man band. In Bricolage, the mellow, acoustic tones of a song like "Creatures" are immediately interrupted by the runaway rattle of a song like "Chomp Samba." Permutation, released the next year, continued his Mingus tinkering, and his Piranha Breaks EP is only dissatisfying because its trumpet wails and machine-gun bongo hits end before the half-hour is up. Then, something changed. His 2000 release, Supermodified, departs from the cool skronk and hops a Greyhound to pure electronics. The warm bass is replaced by a buzzy Baptist jazz organ, hollow surf guitar, cymbals and flute solo cuts. (The bass did return occasionally, as on the scratched scat of Precursor.) That comforting woody wholeness is paved over with glinting titanium. Its sounds are tight and provoking. Instead of listening to a background of match-strikes and sandy textures, you're hearing the steady drone of heavy machinery. It left people agape, as if their dealer had, unexpectedly, prescribed a new fix. Tobin seems determined to evolve, and his new album, Out from Out Where (Ninja Tune), continues in the vein of Supermodified. Samples are cleaner and darker, and songs more dependent on their beat structures. The second track, "Verbal," syncopates a voice sample in the vein of Prefuse 73's Vocal Studies & Uproot Narratives. It's hard to resist temptation, and not try to discern what the snippet was originally saying. It's also hard not to bob up and down. In "Verbal," Tobin is at his best. He's one of the few meddlers who can fully appropriate samples and wind them into something decidedly his own.

Other tracks, such as "Hey Blondie," seem to lose their way, lacking the Ginsu-torn beat to drive them along. Instead of cool jazz downtempo, the slower tracks are background music for the quicker. Without the tonal texture to back it, the music is about the ingenuity of its structure. Where "Blondie" drags, tracks like "Cosmo Retro Intro Outro" and "Triple Science" make a deft entrance and exit, evolving their themes quickly, like Roman-candle bursts. Other songs, depending on the steady "Four Ton Mantis" plod of a solid beat, are a sparkle of DJ highlights (i.e., "Rosies"' retro sample, "So where do you wanna go?... Rosies? Out of sight man. Well, dig it."). El Wraith's infuriatingly (and wonderfully) tangled syncopation threatens to sprain the ankles of anyone who deigns to dance along. Tobin, as usual, manages to marry a plethora of diverse sounds. He's not one of those DJs who, if they played a guitar, would only use three chords.

It's a good album. Tobin just hefted the bar skywards with early releases, not giving himself much future leeway. Early comparisons to Coldcut and Funki Porcini pigeonholed him with his labelmates. He maintains a unique sound, which pours through on a track like "Searchers." Aside from the cantor wail of a digital woodwind and the brief release of chimes, the ominous tones sound like you've been placed in the gastrointestinal tract of a hulking device-maybe the Calder-mobile spaceship in the liner art. It's a song that doesn't need faster or more complex beats, although I wouldn't complain if Tobin's next CD contained more of them.

Tobin ends up back in the realm of jazz, but for other reasons. As the media-induced electrobash continues, dedicated electronic dabblers have been pushed to the periphery. Tobin will maintain his cachet of steady followers, myself included, with this haunting, sound-trackish release. DJs will search out dark, smoke-filled clubs, and develop their encyclopedic knowledge of releases, side projects and live dates, and the mechanisms used to produce each. In a world of 808 loops and feel-good trance, certain artists are bound to become 21st-century beat-niks.

Pied piper, DJ and Brazilian gentleman Amon Tobin will be coming to visit shortly, to a much bigger stage than he played at Knitting Factory earlier this year. I doubt he'll have trouble moving the larger crowd, or selling out the space. I spent half an hour in freezing rain, in a halter top, to get into last February's show, and when I got inside, it wasn't the warmth that excited me.

Amon Tobin plays Fri., Nov. 8, with DJ Food and Bonobo, at Warsaw, 261 Driggs Ave. (betw. Eckford & Leonard Sts.), 718-387-0505.