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. 

INFLUENTIAL ALBUM - AMON TOBIN, BRICOLAGE

For a long time, electronic music was beaten down by the cudgel that it lacked "feeling' and was too "stiff" and "rigid".  This was something that was even embraced by groups like Kraftwerk, who integrated the rigidity of electronics into their aesthetic, to brilliant effect, i might add.  But still, for the first two decades as the technology worked its way from novelty to necessity in the creation of popular music, there were restrictions on its flexibility.  It took time for keyboards to develop sensitivity to velocity and after-touch and rhythmic devices like drum machines and sequencers were generally slavishly tied to quantization. 

It wasn't until the 1990s that the tech began to truly develop the abilities to incorporate more organic feeling attributes into its compositions.  One of the most preeminent pioneers in terms of breaking electronics free from the shackles of perfection and repetition was Amon Tobin, who debuted with his first album, Bricolage, in 1997. 

I recall this album being something of a revelation in my social circles as we'd never heard anything that sounded quite so loose and spontaneous before.  I remember listening to this with fellow musicians who were well up on the latest tools and techniques and being aghast at the fluidity of the percussion and the arrangements.  So much was going on and no two bars of music seemed to be the same.  There were constant shifts and variations happening and it all felt like someone was really playing this stuff, even though we knew it was mostly done by sampling and editing.  We couldn't figure out how the hell he was doing this stuff.

The style of the music also broke free of genre pigeonholes.  Tobin would effortlessly glide from devastating drum & bass to downtempo coolness to jazzy chill without breaking a sweat.  The title, Bricolage, which is an arts term for "the construction or creation of a work from a diverse range of things that happen to be available, or a work constructed using mixed media", fit the contents perfectly as it was a diverse assemblage of sounds and styles that created its own unique vision for both the dance floor and the living room in equal measure.