All of his recent stuff isn't quite my cup of tea, but that's just the nostalgia factor speaking.
I guess anyone who discovers a musician during one of their eras may not necessarily like their other eras...which is more of a condemnation of the listener, rather than the musician, perhaps :)
Foley Room is my #1. I don't mind some of his more recent stuff, even the bass-ey Two Fingers stuff, but I do prefer the early stuff too. Though it's not as much up my alley I'm kind of intrigued by the album he put out under the Figueroa name, which is kind of psychedelic-folk or something. Take a quick listen before reading the next part (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWiXC_O_EVo). Here's the crazy part: Other than his voice, _every_ sound you hear in that song is synthesized and programmed with midi, including the "acoustic" guitar. He said in an interview if you were starting from scratch it would have been easier to learn to play the guitar, but I guess if you've spent your life devoted to mastering electronic production...
Oh man, that's exactly the song I was thinking of (though I had the original, electronically-produced version in mind). The glissando string part, which comes in at 2:28 in your recording, is this cinematic, unapologetic, swaggering thing, like a sweeping helicopter shot of an Aston Martin zooming across Tunisia.
I do prefer the original, electronically-produced version, because I think Amon Tobin is more talented as a producer than as a composer per-se, and I think a lot of the non-"classical" sounds in At the End of the Day are really well selected, like the electric guitar. It adds to the "James Bond"-ness of it all. This is the original, AIUI:
The most striking thing about At the End of the Day is just... how much it actually feels like the end of the day. At least to me. I've been playing it for years now, off and on, when I need to wind down and my day needs to end, and it still does the trick, every time. (Though sometimes I might want^H need to listen to it two or three times....)
I don't know about you all but I miss the websites of 2007. There was so much variation and unbridled creativity. I remembered stumbling upon this page in 2007 while looking up Amon Tobin's soundtrack to Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. I can't remember the last time I saw a musician launch such a beautiful interactive site for their album release. And here it is in 2024, lovingly preserved and still functional on Internet Archive.
I was amazed that the site still runs, apparently still using the same engine.
But it seems that it was a flash site (of course), and archive.org seems to replace Flash Player with "Ruffle" [1]. Either that, or someone of Tobin's team replaced Flash with Ruffle >= 2019.
Spliter Cell: Chaos Theory introduced me to Amon Tobin. Top Gear also heavily played Amon Tobin when showcasing cars, until the BBC had enough of Jeremy Clarkson. Whoever picked the music for the show was a big fan.
Yes! Chaos Theory was my introduction to Tobin as well. As a teenager, I had no interest in music before then, being exposed only to my mom's soft rock CD collections and whatever pop music used to play on the radio. I was surprised to discover later that his music was used for the Toonami intros on Cartoon Network so maybe I was primed to like him before then. [1] That took me down an entire rabbithole of "intelligent dance music" (Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, etc.) and today I mostly enjoy PC Music / Hyperpop which is similarly avant-garde with the way it uses samples or completely synthetic sounds (e.g. SOPHIE, Cashmere Cat, 100 Gecs, AG Cook).
Tobin did a really wonderful interview in 2008 that made me really appreciate electronic music more when I read it regarding how drum and bass is truly avant garde given its manipulative use of samples rather than simply looping beats or lifting long samples because they need a saxophone somewhere: [2]
> Rusty: It seems like now, your more recent music has been more synthetic, more digital and less samples? Is that correct? Or are you just tweaking the samples so much?
> Amon Tobin: It's really just about manipulation now. Like I said, back in the early nineties, it was interesting just to take samples as they were and see what you could do with them. And now, the technology has advanced so much more and there's a lot more room for maneuvers between synthesizers and synthetic processes applied to recorded material and sampled material. So there's much more of a hybrid going on now as far as I'm concerned and so my music is maybe now a little bit less easy to define in terms of is it sampled best or is it synthesized or is it just, you know, I guess, electronic, really.
> ...
> Rusty: I know. I was going back through some of my older CD's from that period, which I hadn't listened to in a while, and I was like "That was really good." I mean, it's super stylistic, so you tend to burn out if you hear a little too much of it.
> Amon Tobin: Well, the interesting thing about drum and bass is that it was, to me it felt like it was a genuinely forward-thinking type of music. People were really trying to do new things. They weren't trying to be nostalgic or relive some golden era of music in the seventies. It was all about 'Let's try and make something truly futuristic and do things with production that had never been possible before.' And that spirit still remains, as small as the genre is. It's influenced a lot of other types of music which are much more in the forefront now. So, you know, I think it's normal. These things go in cycles. Things become, you know, they become very much in the spotlight.
A very modernist take, pushing boundaries for its own sake. Contrast with pop music which is exactly the opposite, being rearrangements of standards.
Somehow I find his music is perfect for working with code. It feels like it really meshes with my mind in a way I've never found with other artists.
Also was sad to see he recently retired from live shows, but am glad I got to see him live several times several times in San Franciso. He shows were always mind-blowing and it's such a pleasure to see a master at work. Plus I respected how humble he was; his talent is far far beyond artists who are more financially successful, and he avoids the spotlight. I wish there was more available about how his mind works, because it must be very unique.
It's sad, but unfortunately it's kind of like the whole "vulkan" issue: allow a great tool to degenerate that people can actually easily use (Flash) and then replace it by much more difficult to use and/or less well supported technologies (HTML5)
The issue is, the training and support for similar projects in JS and CSS took such a long time (and honestly is still nowhere near the ease of use of Flash) that by just a few years later interactive websites became a throwback anyway. Now, if anyone were to do that, it would carry a dreadful air of nostalgia.
That said, perhaps they would have carried on if not for Adobe basically refusing to fix Flash, but I think by the time Steve Jobs' note was published it was already out of vogue. The end of skeuomorphism and the era of "flat design everything" was concurrent, and these were easily accommodated by contemporary web technologies without Flash. I think that's also an important point, there was an era where such websites as Amon Tobin's were considered basically old-fashioned and lethargic, and everyone was genuinely very excited about turning everything into flat design.
He also did the soundtrack for one of the Tom Clancy games (Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory). While I’ve never played the game, I really enjoyed the music.
This is how I discovered Amon Tobin! I remember when the 'Theme From Battery' kicked in, I put the controller down and listened to the whole track before going on Google to find out who did this.
I was a big fan fifteen years ago. I'd love to hear from other fans of Amon Tobin back in the day, what are you listening to these days? What contemporary music should I check out if I was an amon tobin fan 15 years ago?
Plaid. Every album so far has been on the edge of the music landscape as it released. The last album, among other things, combining real and physical modelled instruments in electronic soundscapes against a AI/generative backdrop, The previous one incorporating gamalan structures and rythems among advances in sound design. Back in the day they where also using generative rytems, virtual voices, all kind of digital sythesis techniques when they just became aviable.
It's one of the few artist in the electronic frontier that imho manages to consistently make musical songs with state of the art tech. In contract to newer stuff from for example Clark or Amon Tobin where it feels the intresting sounds are the song instead of intresting sounds making the song.
Love that someone signed up for this comment :).
Seeing them performing the polymer album at a small venue (where some instrumental parts where performed live) right after Nils Frahm is a fond memory of mine, and I agree that there is not really much out there that compares to their unique sound.
Next to their usual stuff/albums there is a plethora of remixes out there. Can recommend this fan-driven youtube channel for an overview:
Forest Swords is the artist that comes to my mind for newer stuff besides the old Warp artists although I wouldn't call that IDM at all. I am not even sure what I would call Forest Swords.
I might even put Forest Swords up there with all the old Warp artists but its like he came to play the chill out room at 8am and everyone had already left the party.
Have a listen to Hidden Orchestra. They do (did?) a great live show with sequenced tracks plus live cello and twin drumkits. Night Walks is a wonderful album.
Interesting question. I only recently went back to listening to stuff like that during work and am struggling to find stuff from post 2010 or so. I think I've kind of used things like https://open.spotify.com/album/2bu7BrEuunURavjRY9qkyR?si=caf... as a replacement, wholly instrumental or foreign-language albums that won't distract me from flow state.
I'm still really enjoying most of his recent work, check out all the aliases on Nomark Records if you haven't yet.
Through his DJ mixes I discovered Tipper, Noisia, Frank Riggio.
+1 to Hidden Orchestra which someone else mentioned. I also really love what Stimming is doing.
Besides electronic music, I listen to a lot of jazz these days, and jam bands like Vulfpeck. I mention this because Amon Tobin's early records are what originally got me into jazz.
There is music like this that is an experience. Listening to them in the 90s, along with Aphex Twin, Amon Tobin, FSOL, were the sounds of hacker spaces. Soundscapes doesn't cover it, they're compositions.
What's so strange is that when I listen to this music now, I get nostalgia, but it's not for anything that was shared. It was a frame of mind in a moment, and not a memory of people. This music was a weirdly private experience.
I don’t want to say I’m disappointed with his output, because I’m not. His creative and artistic self is far beyond what most people are willing to invest and endure of their life force into, and I appreciate knowing a person like him is out there.
I suppose I’m mostly heartbroken that we’ve had a golden decade of some incredible music from this person and he has essentially disappeared into an abyss of soundscaping. I think Foley Room was the transition period and then ISAM really went all out.
Parallels can be made with bands like Autechre, but that’s a different discussion.
Yup, I couldn't agree more. His music from back in the day is so incredibly unique and nobody has made anything like it before or since. It's impossible to find anything like it. Unfortunately he seems to no longer want to make music like that.
If I was a billionaire I'd write him a blank cheque to make more music like his old stuff.
But, I'm no musician, maybe he literally can't anymore. I don't know how it works, or how insulting the mere notion would be to him.
Weird, I saw this article about Pitchfork being merged into GQ [0], which points to this stats page on Pitchfork [1] only to see Amon Tobin is one of the select few to receive a perfect 10 for Bricolage in 1997 to then having him reaching the front page of HN. All that in the span of 30 minutes.
There was a TV commercial for the Wii that had Amon Tobin's "Verbal" as the song while the player flipped their couch and jumped around their living room while playing Metroid. The song fit so well and was so cool and different, it kind of stuck with me. I don't remember how, but some time later I heard it again with the keywords "ninja tune" attached to it, and I thought that was the name. Took quite a number of years until I found out what the song and artist's names actually were.
Way way later, I found the commercial's footage on archive.org, but it didn't feature the song, which was a shame.
I'll never forget working at skateboard.com back in 2000 and watching éS: Menikmati and Slowly was the opening track. I didn't even care about the video, I just wanted to know what the music was...
Still does. Kamasi washington, thundercat, louis cole, kadhja bonet, laurel, haitus kaiyote are all at the top of their game and signed to ninja tune.
It's a really different sound from "back in the day" and likely to be rejected by a lot of the people who grew up on like, bonobo and dj vadim. But the label plays the same role, favoring experimental & alternative groove-based musicians.
The "original" ninja tune artists were so influential that key elements of their sound just became part of the main stream of pop and hip hop today. The current crew is similarly disproportionately influential on other musicians, and I'm nearly certain it will play out the same way.
I didn't realize Kamasi Washington is on Ninja Tune!
They had a predilection for releasing zillions of compilation albums with heavily overlapping track lists, which kind of fatigued me on the label, but I'm still fond of the early releases of theirs that I bought.
Actually I think he's on flying lotus's label, which ninja tune distributes or something like that, which may be the case with some of these others too. The alt-electronic/jazz/hip-hop/fusion label situation right now is way beyond my ability to comprehend. But I still see the ninja tune logo on a lot of vinyl that I like.
Amon Tobin was also an early adopter of Final Scratch on Linux. His "Recorded Live" album on Ninja Tune's Solid Steel series included liner notes about the challenges of touring with a Linux laptop instead of records in 2003.
Amon Tobin has lots of great music. Another one to check out by him is the Adventures in Foam album that he did under the Cujo moniker. Very heavy on jazz samples.
Easy Muffin has to be my favorite song of his as well as Get Your Snack On.
I tried 3 browsers and didnt get audio in any of them. Only occasional fractions of a second of audio. I tried the high quality and low quality options.
I had to drop to the low-res version. Guessing whatever they used for detecting high-bandwidth connections is failing to grasp the values a decade-and-a-half later.
He's been posting some really interesting 3d art and composition on Instagram, where he also announced he was retiring from DJing. Glad to see him explore his art the way he sees fit instead of turning into a music factory.
His stuff with the London Symphony Orchestra is bonkers (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggl_pWkbEoc).
All of his recent stuff isn't quite my cup of tea, but that's just the nostalgia factor speaking. I guess anyone who discovers a musician during one of their eras may not necessarily like their other eras...which is more of a condemnation of the listener, rather than the musician, perhaps :)