Product Description

Amon Tobin stands at a rhythmic crossroads only his bi-continental background can explain. His head-nod is infected with hip-hop beats, his mind reels with jungle's accelerated breaks, and he strides to a sampledelic bebop swing; yet Tobin's musical soul is also saturated with the sounds of his Brazilian heritage. The most perfect moments on PERMUTATION, his second full-length album, happen in the fusion of modern rhythms and styles with the Carnival drums of the Bahia region or with the Bossa Nova pop sounds that have been Rio's musical calling cards since the early '60s.
Like DJ Shadow, with whom he shares a creative methodology if not source material, Tobin sculpts pieces out of found sources and the beats he attaches to them. Unlike Shadow, Tobin's beats pledge allegiance to no single rhythmic style. The quieter tracks move peacefully on striding basslines and abstract horn jams or drift by as ambient-lounge bossas. And when Tobin unleashes the breakbeat flurries of his more junglist tendencies, he draws upon the powers of the dozens-strong samba drum brigades of his homeland, fusing them with dark jungle's shrill sound effects and bebop's piano/bass phrases and tempos. Together, they make up a soundtrack to a rhythmically diverse, global-minded future.

Track Listing

1. Like Regular Chickens
2. Bridge
3. Reanimator
4. Sordid
5. Nightlife
6. Escape
7. Switch
8. People Like Frank
9. Sultan Drops
10. Fast Eddie
11. Toys
12. Nova
13. Melody Infringement

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #76632 in Music
• Released on: 1998-06-01
• Number of discs: 1

Amazon.co.uk Review
With its lush strings; its deep, snaking bass tremors; and its odd patches of percussive irritants, Amon Tobin's latest album sounds at times like the kind of noir-ish drum & bass that Luke Vibert (a.k.a. Wagon Christ) has left behind. Such torch passing seems fitting since Permutation's focus on jazz sample sources grew out of Tobin's own career switch: dropping, if only for now, the Brazilian percussion and pop flavours that have long infused his home-brewed electronica. A languorous dollop of bossa nova closes this album, but otherwise it almost exclusively explores jazz: hard-bop drum solos, luscious horn lines, and mellifluous fusoid guitar. Tobin programs all this expressly analogue material into his small battery of synthesizers and produces one of the strongest albums of 1998. --Marc Weidenbaum

About the Artist
A dark, perverse call of 'Eureka' echoes around Amon's lab/studio as something new takes shape. Like an alternate universe in a Philip K. Dick novel, Amon's musical spaces are based on the familiar, but one must wonder as one journeys through it, what is real- and whether the world will ever look the same again.

Cutting up source material into tiny bits, Amon has elevated the sampler from tool to instrument, creating worlds of sound from stacks of vinyl and a multitude of genres, from jazz to Bollywood, from Brazilian rhythms to hip hop.  And while the music is a feast of samples, everything found is new again, as it's warped, filtered, reversed and distorted as some fantastic breakbeat monster.

Amon first recorded as Cujo for Ninebar Records, culminating in his debut album, "Adventures In Foam". Ninja heard an early 12" and began speaking to him - the result was 1997's classic, "Bricolage". Described as being like "stuffing Lionel Hampton, Art Blakey and Mingus into a compression chamber..." (Rough Guide To Drum & Bass), the album was an international success. It was followed up by the darker but no less rhythmically stunning "Permutation". People began comparing Amon to Ennio Morricone, artists as diverse as David Byrne and Cannibal Corpse went out of their way to praise him and Tobin found himself playing sold out shows at the Montreal Jazz Festival, the Knitting Factory in New York and the Coachella Festival. In fact, so successful was Amon in North America that "Permutation" was the best selling album of '98 for the renowned Other Music store in NYC, outselling the likes of Bjork, Massive Attack and Air.

Following the massive success of "Permutation" Amon dropped "Supermodified", which was in some ways a departure, in others a development of everything that had gone before. The record is an experiment in sound - bass sounds made from motorbikes and tubas, breaks made from spitting and farting. The warped creativity continued was undoubtedly enhanced by Tobin's choice of collaborators. Chris Morris (of Brass Eye and Blue Jam fame) appears on "Bad Sex" ("Now chuck the spade at the child...") released on the "Slowly" 10" (April 2000), while Precursor features Montreal cyber-beatboxer Quadraceptor double-timing it like his tongue's on fire.

All of which brings us to "Out From Out Where".  Darker, more complex, even more rhythmically driving and intense than ever before, this huge record has cemented Tobin's reputation as one of the most innovative and important names in electronic music today.  Taking a compositional approach, Tobin delivers massive widescreen lush production, flips hip hop on its head with the barely decipherable 'Verbal', gives sci-fi a new soundtrack with 'Back from Space' and screws with our understanding of what is possible.

"Out From Out Where" differs from its predecessors in that they were made using only found sound (most of them generated by Amon himself) while here he steps back to some slightly more traditional sources (displaying in particular, a love of guitar licks). But when Tobin takes a sample source, he is never happy until he has smashed and messed with it until it sounds like something straight from his head. And not just anywhere in his head, but that dingy, cobwebbed corner where no one should go…  

In fact, this has to be the most straight-up nasty and dangerous album that Tobin has yet made - music with the power to lull you into a false sense of security, and dropping seriously subversive hints that all is not as it seems, and possibly, never ever was. Collaborating with notables such as Steinski and Kid Koala in the months since the album, Amon has shown his ability to mesh his sound with musical sources outside of those he creates and recreates in his own studio.  This can only keep us guessing where he will lead us to next.

Customer Reviews

Nothing like you've ever heard
How often do you find an album in which there are no 'filler' tracks? Answer: very rarely. This is one of those albums.
As someone else said in another review, ignore all of the myths you've heard about drum 'n bass being mindless and for junkies. Amon Tobin is much cleverer than that, and as a result, the album contains a mix of everything. Drum 'n bass with menacing 'melody' lines, jazz which could have come straight out of a 30's jazz club had it not had a heavy, but catchy beat laid down on top of it, and even a bit of bossa nova and other brazilian music styles, hailing back to Tobin's birthplace.
Its getting on for 9 years since this was released, but i'd still listen to it rather than the trash that gets put in the charts today. Another bit of proof that commercially successful stuff doesn't always equal good listening.
Just for the record, my faves are 'Bridge' for its jazziness and 'People like Frank' for being one of the darkest tunes i've ever heard in my lifetime. I think it could be time for a re-release for 'Permutation'. Its what it deserves.

Stunning... a real 'grower'
21st century Jazz? Classical Drum and Bass?

I really don't quite know how to describe Amon Tobin's unique style, I don't think you can really pigeonhole it. It's a musical mish-mash of heavily Jazz-influenced ecclectic beats, but mixed in a stunningly precise modern fashion.

From my rather muddled description above, you're probably thinking it sounds like a complete mess, and I'd tend to agree with you. Upon first listening to this album, I wasn't massively impressed; I instantly liked a couple of tracks, notably "Nightlife" which is a stunning blend of orchestral breakbeat mayhem. But the rest of the album, just like "Out from Outwhere", seemed all rather noisy and confused.

But perhaps that is part of the magic that makes me play this CD time and time again. As you listen for the third, fourth time you start to really unravel it's hidden depths and catch a glimpse of the world inside Amon Tobin's twisted mind...

If, like me, you have wide musical tastes but aren't completely averse to electronica, buy it. Then listen to it. Then listen to it again. Maybe once more. Then you'll see what I mean - it's big, it's scary, it's damn complicated and it's an absolute masterpeice.

Jon

The best album ever I kid ye not!
Ok so here I am saying how this is my favourite album ever etc etc well I know that doesn't mean much (though p'raps a little?!) to you but this album - it's just so amazingly good! If you've heard any of Amon Tobin's other albums, then this serves as a mediator in style as it does chronologically: the manic, furious breaks and production from Bricolage feature prominently yet the depth and tone of Supermodified are also apparent but, generally, the album has more in common with the excellent but ultimately inferior Bricolage album of 1997. Permutations is very accessible and since hearing it loads (well a few!) of friends have bought it for whom Tobin is not a typical music taste. However, this aspect detracts absolutely nothing form the musical mastery and ingenuity of the album which is unequalled. It is, overall, a predominantly dark, innovative jazz-breakbeat fusion with no weak tracks and moreover that quality where as you listen to each track, you feel sure that that one has to be the best on the album - until you listen to the next track which sounds even better! If you are still unsure about it, just click on buy and if you somehow manage not to love it to bits then you can always take it back - only that won't happen! Standout tracks for me, if pushed, are Sultan Drops, Reanimator and Nightlife - which commences with a fairy-tale like ambience (not without enigma though!) which is suddenly cut short by a striking discord - (getting darker!) - then the fairy-tale tune again, then the introduction and eventual consumption of the epic track by increasingly dense breakbeats. Ok so now I'm confusing you but listen for yourself you WILL comprendez! One final warning: once heard you will enter Tobin's fantastic world and have to acquire his other two breathtaking albums, but fear not for you wont be disappointed.