Dusted Down – Amon Tobin: Out From Out Where (Ninja Tune)
With his own How Do You Live album about to drop, former label Ninja get into Tobin reissue mode
Amon Tobin: Out From Out Where (Ninja Tune)
Amon Tobin has reached a peculiar stage in his musical career; the reissue stage. But there’s a bit more to it than just that: like twisted pinnacles of Everest – which only the bravest of mountaineers can even find, let alone traverse – Tobin’s trajectory has charted the kind of artistic peaks very few artists can claim to have reached.
For over two decades, he remained faithful to his springboard label Ninja Tune: the indie major who signed him for his broken, cyperpunkish breakbeat, nu-jazz and trip hop, and later put him on the map as a foley IDM titan.
But in the previous two years, he’s broken away, operating in other aliases both new and old (Stone Giants, Figueroa, Only Child Tyrant, Two Fingers and Cujo) for his own label, Nomark Records. Indeed, he is due to return to – shock, horror – his own name next month with the release of How Do You Live, on Nomark.
Owing to his uncanny ability to slowly traverse discrepant genres over the course of his career – breakbeat, IDM, nu-jazz, drum and bass – Nomark unifies them, with Tobin working with everyone from fellow neuro sculptor Thys (formerly of Noisia) and indie rock frontman Patrick Watson.
But in as much as we’re taken in by all this new material, it still works best when cast in the light of Tobin’s former releases. So, what better time than now to reissue 2002’s ‘Out From Out Where’, his fourth album for Ninja? As one Eric L so aptly put it, this album is “the last of Original Amon before he dabbled in more experimental sounds and eventually left the known world of music altogether.” This isn’t a Stunt Rhythms nor is it an ‘ISAM’. This is a pure example of OG Tobin – still far ahead of his time – dabbling in the trip hop, downtempo and beatjazz vogues of the early noughties, yet doing so in a wacked-out, glass-shattering manner only he could muster.
What’s more is that its predecessor, ‘Supermodified’, was made only using found sound recorded by the artist himself – a technique he would continue later in his career with ‘ISAM’. Out From Out Where, by contrast, is less stringent and oblique, making use of at least some samples and less-processed recordings. A great example is track 2, ‘Verbal’, which contains a very ostentatious hip hop acapella. While still obviously a sample, it’s stuttered to oblivion, and Tobin has sculpted a cavernous beat around it, topping it off with his patented metallic clatterings and clunks that, as ever, show off his inhuman ear for dynamics. Rather than detracting from his credibility, this use of samples seems to have opened up a little more creative headspace, enabling him to create what is arguably his most enjoyable project.
It clearly doesn’t take much gain to give such expansive electronic music a funky edge. Tobin’s jazz influences shine through in the occasional bass and electric piano riff (hear ‘Hey Blondie’ and ‘Proper Hoodidge’), which always remain as variable and faux-improvised as any other electronic element in his tracks, despite their low level in the mix. Elsewhere, though, it seems as though this album is the threshold between ‘human’ funk and ‘inhuman’ cybertopia. Sometimes, as on the subtly filmic beatscape that is ‘El Wraith’, twanging koto seems to open up into a synthetic vocal choir. We can even hear preemptive echoes of Tobin’s late-career forays into drum n’ bass, as on the hyperspeed chop-sorcery of ‘Triple Science’. With such a track title – and a boffin’s monologue peppered throughout the track, talking of “electromagnetic oscillators” – it’s clear Tobin takes a scientific, and not sorcerous or mysterious, approach to his productions. This album that sums that approach up. While not as extensively produced as some of his later work (it’s nice and dry, preceding the echo and reverb that saturated a lot of later neuro and IDM), it still shows off Tobin’s vision of a somehow enjoyable techno-dystopia; one overwhelmed by huge, animate beams of sonic metal and electricity, yet still touched by something funky, jazzy, human.
Jude Iago James