Ninja Tune artist Amon Tobin started out experimenting with a double cassette player and ended up piloting the world’s most mind-blowing live show. With a new album out under his Two Fingers moniker, we met him in his secluded musical lab and discovered an endless desire to push the boundaries of sound...
Words:JOE ROBERTS Cover pic: JOSEPH LLANES Feature pics: NATHAN SEABROOK, THEO JEMISON
from the ground upwards with a sound palette created in a way that few could imagine, let alone emulate, its synergistic live show has been pushed to the edges of technological advancement, creating a bedazzling display of interstellar incandescence casting Tobin as a space traveller performing inside a video-mapped, multi-cubed ‘space ship’ stage production. Making other shows of its ilk look like the impotent fizzing of an indoor firework, the commercial success of ‘Isam’ — it’s thus far toured Europe, the USA, Canada (launching at Mutek and headlining Coachella), Australia and Japan — is all the more exceptional given the increasingly idiosyncratic experimentations of Amon. Having
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realize there are people who are deeply resentful about any new turns you want to explore and I do get a perverse kick out of winding those people up,” admits Amon Tobin, the Ninja Tune-backed artist who over his 15-year career has risen from sleeping in shady South London studios to emerging as electronic music’s most far-out thinker. Constructing his 2011 album ‘Isam’
started making straightforward sample-based tracks, he’s evolved into a sonic scientist developing instruments from deliberately chosen and recorded sounds, fashioning these on ‘Isam’ into a bold meeting point between fierce bass mechanics, delicate lullaby-like melodies and slippery, shifting musique concrete. But while ‘Isam’ was the pinnacle of years of studio study, his latest release, under the guise of Two Fingers, flips the script again to return to the initial inspiration of his youth. “When I was a teenager my own first thing was hip-hop,” explains the 40-year-old Brazil-born producer on double album ‘Stunt Rhythms’ (out now) when DJ Mag USA meets him in the small secluded town, an hour’s drive from San Francisco, where he has his home and studio. “That’s where I tried to find my own identity.”
IDENTITY
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It’s this search for identity that has driven everything Tobin has done since, a back catalogue of eight studio albums, one official live mix, and this year’s hefty and exhaustive limited-edition box set of six records, seven CDs and two DVDs, insensible
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