Amon Tobin
Permutation

Amon Tobin, young Brazilian imported to Brighton, UK and currently residing in Montreal, Canada, states in interviews that he doesn’t actually feel very influenced by his travels. However, the rest of the world is convinced otherwise, and indeed, this work - his second album for Ninja Tune - dated 1998, has greatly confirmed this general impression. If not more than the first album "Bricolage" (a telling name), "Permutation," as the title goes, honors the extraordinary sensitivity as a producer and turntablist of young Tobin who, in this album, genuinely plays with everything. From samples of Eraserhead of Lynchian memory, which give the title to the opener "Like Regular Chickens", to cut-and-paste with swing-jazz flavors, from heavily drum'n'bass beats to more minimal, almost jungle and/or lounge ones, the sound palette within which Amon Tobin operates seems to grow in width and depth with each listening.

While "Bricolage" lived on 'cinematic' but often light and cool atmospheres, "Permutation" sees the complex Tobin sound approach increasingly darker and 'smoky' shores, flirting with the atmospheres of a "Dummy" or a "Mezzanine", to name just a couple, but maintaining that strange and in its own way unmistakable trademark made of "flavorful" and balanced sampling, which playfully interacts with the most disparate sounds that Tobin himself claims to search for in 'crappy records that no one would listen to'. However, this ability to create sonorous pastiche (my god what a beautiful word), a skill not so rare (see for example the works of turntablist Kid Koala, "Blood Inside" by Ulver or even the "Naked City" by Zorn) reaches in Tobin a new dimension, since "Permutation" is not just a juxtaposition, coherent or incoherent as it may be, of disparate sounds, but it is an ensemble that is gestaltically more than the sum of its parts, it is indeed something that finds its identity amidst the thousand defaced identities of these strange cut-up sounds (with a certain and evident personal satisfaction), it is music that conveys, that communicates by itself, without merely saying, perhaps with irony, "Iamachunkofsamples" (see, since they were mentioned earlier, a track like the fantastic "Speedfreaks" by Naked City - which finds its strength precisely in irony). Not that irony and fun are missing in "Permutation": it is not an ultra-serious album of dark-quasi-minimalist post-Berlin Wall experimental electronic neo-classic avant-garde, but it is also not an ultra-light album of light-hearted revisionist revivalist semi-old-new-wave pre-primitivist pop.

The answer once again lies in the middle, in the music gathered in "Permutation" which by its nature finds few and clumsy words to describe it fully if not: listen and (hopefully) you won't regret it.