365 Days of Song Recommendations: March 20

Stoney Street — Amon Tobin

During the mid- to late-90s, electronic music crossed over — stepping out into the midday sun, blinking and shielding its eyes from the mysterious star that suffocated the endless night. During these wild years when hallucinogens were as commonplace as Altoids, the mainstream and the Nosferatous rave culture intersected. Hollywood movie soundtracks like Hackers and The Saint (to name two of dozens) featured an array of electronica. Pop artists like U2 and Madonna dabbled in bleeps and bloops with various degrees of critical and commercial success.

But did you actually, really, honestly like the music? Or was it the weird cousin to the swing revival? Were you a Cherry Poppin’ Daddy or a Lo Fidelity Allstar?

And before I get going on this post in earnest, I want to share a personal bugaboo of mine. Don’t call it EDM. Just fucking don’t. If you can cast the same umbrella over Sly and the Family Stone and Skrillex, it. doesn’t. mean. anything.

Some of the electronic music I loved wouldn’t inspire the highest of kites to oscillate in a hurricane.

But where to start with electronica? Where’s the line of demarcation, the line that separates the casuals who at least recognized the greatness of The Dust Brothers’ score to Fight Club and those Mixmag regulars?

To me, Amon Tobin has always been the electronic music lovers litmus test. You love the Chemical Brothers and The Prodigy and maybe you’ve listened to a fair amount of Orbital and the Underworld? That’s gravy. But what’s the best Amon Tobin record?

Amon Tobin’s a Brazilian-born composer, producer and electronic music artist. You might not know his name, but you’ve certainly heard influence on popular music of the last twenty years. He’s composed for movies (21 and The Italian Job) and even popular video game soundtracks (Infamous and Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory).

What sets Tobin apart is his refusal to settle into a style of music confined by genre. Jazz, rap, R&B. Influences from Latin America, Eastern Europe, African rhythms. Every record is an experiment. Every recording an excuse to try something, to strive for invention. On his 2007 record The Foley Room, Tobin included samples from big cats, insects, motorcycles and water dripping. (And that’s just what I picked out in my listen earlier today.) If it makes sound, it might be music.

I even wrote a screenplay based on Tobin’s Supermodified (2000). It wasn’t good, but his music forced words to pour out of me, setting scenes and staging action through the force and invention of the music itself.

Experimentation inspired experimentation. The greatest track on Supermodified has oddly disappeared from Spotify though the album remains.

I want to go all the way back to 1997’s Bricolage, his second record, a less commercial outing than the ones that would follow. Unbridled experimentation in genre. He was finding his way as an artist, as a wunderkind on the electronica scene.

I connected with its opening track, “Stoney Street,” because it turns an upright bass into the funkiest instrument that ever walked the earth. It’s an album of moldy jazz riffs remixed into something extraordinary by way of production techniques common in jungle music (itself a precursor of drum and bass, born out of the UK breakbeat scene). “Stoney Street” and the other jazz-inspired tracks on Bricolage provide a direct connection to the evolution of trip-hop towards the later 1990’s and early 2000’s.

Tobin’s work is moody and otherwordly — grounded and ephemeral. It resists any attempt to pin it down as any one thing. It’s the product of an artist that operates on another planet. “Stoney Street” might not be the most Amon Tobin track, but it’s a gateway drug. It’s the red pill that takes you deeper into the potential of electronic music and shows you the great creative beyond.

I’ll leave you with a sample of his work and the audio/visual spectacle from the 2012 ISAM tour.

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