Description:Amazon.com's Best of 2000
Amon Tobin's off-kilter rhythms and jazzy samples create a beautiful mess on Supermodified. Feeding off Latin rhythms, downtempo beats, and wildly adventurous musical jumbles, Tobin's manic bliss never allows the songs to wander, working a sense of method into a sea of crazy atmospheres. The result is focusedAmazon.com's Best of 2000
Amon Tobin's off-kilter rhythms and jazzy samples create a beautiful mess on Supermodified. Feeding off Latin rhythms, downtempo beats, and wildly adventurous musical jumbles, Tobin's manic bliss never allows the songs to wander, working a sense of method into a sea of crazy atmospheres. The result is focused, enticing, and fascinating. --Matthew Cooke
At the junction of jazz and breakbeat science, Amon Tobin is one of the undisputed masters. Instead of drawing on jazz samples and styles as a sort of prepackaged cultural signifier, he's engaged in the cross-fertilization and recontextualizing that many aspire to but not so many achieve. On this release, he casts his net farther afield--the smoky nightclub trumpets and sultry beats of 1998's Permutation are still present, but the hummingly intense electronics and roiling drums on tracks like "Rhino Jockey" leave the jazz references pretty far behind. The track "Precursor" uses what is called "vocal percussion" to emulate the click-and-pop assemblages of some of the farther out German electronic experimentalists and segues neatly into the down-tempo groove of "Saboteur," which is built on a bottle-clinking percussive sample from obscure '60s blues-rock outfit the Aynsley Dunbar Retaliation. "Keepin' It Steel" is reminiscent of Stereolab in a way, with a pleasantly lazy tempo that manages the neat trick of sounding like it's in an odd-metre time signature when it's not, punctuated by horns that evoke a '70s reggae record. --Bob Bannister
Explore
Forums
Join Listal
Movies
TV Shows
DVDs
Music
Books
Games
Lists
Reviews
Images
