AMON TOBIN - BRICOLAGE @ 25

Marking its 25th anniversary today is the debut album from Amon Tobin, Bricolage, which was released on May 19th, 1997. Technically, it’s his sophomore release, but his first album was issued a year prior under the artist name, Cujo, while Bricolage was the first album released under his own name.

It’s an album that took the idea of integrating vintage jazz influences with contemporary electronica to new extremes. Tobin, a Brazilian native, started out from the vantage point of break-beat and drum & bass DJ culture and gave it all a hard swing into the territory of cool jazz, exotica, be bop and Latin influences. The results of his hybridization turned out to be a turning point for trip-hop and drum & bass.

I remember when I first heard this album, it felt like a musical sea-change had hit in the dance music underground. Certainly, the jazz influence was present prior to this and downtempo hip-hop music had made a lot of great strides in this direction, but Tobin exhibited a dexterity and fluidity in his music that belied its electronic, sampler based technical production. It seemed to be let loose from any sense of rigidity or slavish repetition and we marveled at the prospect of what he had managed to do with the gear of the day.

It’s an approach which has remained viable for the past quarter century as the album sounds like it could easily be a product of contemporary origin. The fact of its relevance today is striking when compared to the shifts in music we’ve seen in prior eras of popular music. Twenty five years is a long time. When you think about what music was like in 1980 and then compare that back to 1955, it seems like they’re separated by a century. The fact that this album still seems modern for us now means that we’ve reached a kind of plateau in the art form and there hasn’t been a lot of progress in what really is a new century for us now.