Amon Tobin

Tobin worked across disc jockey, composer, record producer and musician. The registers place that work in electronic music, trip hop and intelligent dance music. This article rests on 100 catalogued compositions, 117 issued recordings and 7 scholarly references drawn from named institutional registers. Every statement below returns to a source shown in the evidence panel; where the record is silent or divided, the article says so instead of resolving it.

• Name — Amon Tobin • Landscape — yes • Birth Name — Amon Adonai Santos de Araújo Tobin • Alias — * Cujo • Two Fingers • Only Child Tyrant • Figueroa • Stone Giants • Born — 7 February 1972 • Birthplace — Rio de Janeiro, Brazil • Instrument — * Synthesizers • keyboards • guitar • bass guitar • drums • drum machine • sampler • saxophone • theremin • chapman stick • Genre — * Electronic • IDM • nu jazz • trip hop • drum and bass • musique concrète • experimental • Occupation — * Record producer • musician • DJ • Years Active — 1995–present • Label — * Nomark • Ninja Tune • Ninebar • Website — amontobin.com

Tobin was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. At the age of 2, he and his family left Brazil to live in Morocco, the Netherlands, London, Portugal and Madeira. Tobin settled in Brighton, England as a teenager, which remained his permanent residence until 2002. There he began producing electronic music in his bedroom with samplers and other audio equipment including an Amstrad Studio 100 4-track, although he was "not really involved in the [music] scene" at that time. While taking an editorial photography class at a university in Brighton, he responded to a magazine promotion for the London-based Ninebar record label asking artists to send in demos of their songs. Ninebar signed Tobin to the label in 1996 after hearing his early work, and he traveled between his home in Brighton and the studios in London to produce his first official works. Under his original moniker Cujo (after the Stephen King novel of the same name), he released a series of original compositions on 12-inch vinyl. AllMusic called them "head-turning" in a review. Many of those tracks were later included on his first full-length album Adventures in Foam, originally released in 1996 by Ninebar to a limited release of 5,000 copies. The larger Ninja Tune record label had been growing in the United Kingdom at the time with help from artists DJ Food, Funki Porcini, The Herbaliser, and Coldcut. DJ Food and Funki Porcini noticed Tobin's work on Adventures in Foam and prompted the label to approach him. Ninja Tune signed Tobin in late 1996, this time under his abbreviated name "Amon Tobin". The official Ninja Tune website has said that Adventures in Foam had been re-released without permission by the US-based Shadow Records that same year and that this unauthorized version, labeled the "US release", included only 7 of the original songs, different cover art, and that some tracks were titled incorrectly. In 1997 Ninja Tune acquired the proper licenses from Ninebar and re-released the album themselves. This version included the original album in its entirety, and a second disc containing previously unreleased material. As of 2008, copies of Shadow Record's "US version" are sold by online retailer Amazon.com. Over the course of its production, Adventures in Foam has been reviewed favorably. Ryan Schreiber of Pitchfork Media said that its break-beat style "got totally out of hand", but that it "never fails to let the listener know who's in charge." The album was released for a fourth time in 2002, again by Ninja Tune.

Over the next several years, Tobin released three albums. Bricolage, released in 1997, was the culmination of two projects Tobin had started after his debut album earlier that year. His third album Permutation was released in 1998. In the late 1990s, sample-based music was becoming more popular with a wide range of emerging and developing genres, but Tobin himself was still largely unknown. Tobin's style of music was not seen as definitively belonging to one genre or another. The critics that commented on Bricolage and Permutation gave them positive reviews and they are often mentioned, by later reviewers and interviewers, as classic albums of the time. Pitchfork acclaimed the use of jazz instrument samples, comparing him to famous composers Quincy Jones and Miles Davis. In a 1999 review, they awarded Bricolage a very rare 10/10 and said that it was "one of the most inventive records of the decade." Tobin released his fourth album, Supermodified in 2000. The album is regarded as his most commercial album to date. Critic reviews were generally positive, with Pitchfork rating the album 9.1/10, and Stylus Magazine saying, "Not many studio-bound electronic musicians could put forward such a vivid and dynamic statement or make it as entertaining and downright funky as Supermodified has managed to do."

In 2006, Tobin began collaborating on a hip-hop oriented project with British drum-and-bass producer Doubleclick and a number of guest vocalists. As Two Fingers, the pair have released several singles, followed by their self-titled debut album in 2009. The eponymous release came out in 2009 on Paper Bag Records in North America and Big Dada in the United Kingdom. The two producers, who first met when Tobin was living in Brighton, U.K., got together in Montreal in 2007 over a series of tracks that were partially an extension of their previous collaborations — exemplified by the dense, pummeling 2003 track "Ownage" — but in general, a fundamentally new and dynamic direction incorporating visceral elements of dancehall, dubstep, and grime. Following the singles "That Girl" and "What You Know," the group's self-titled debut was released in spring 2009, featuring vocals from dancehall star Ce'Cile, Ms. Jade, and, on seven of the album's 12 tracks, British rapper Sway. In 2009, Tobin also collaborated with the UK drum-and-bass artist Dom & Roland on a track titled “Sylo” for the album No Strings Attached. In 2008, Tobin announced he was working on a new video game soundtrack for an "undisclosed PS3 title". This was later revealed to be the PlayStation 3 exclusive game, inFamous, and in 2010, Tobin announced that he would be working on the music for Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Conviction. Recent works include "Hey Mr. Tree" as a 'Bonus Joint' to accompany his earlier 'Monthly Joint' collection, a remix of Noisia's "Machine Gun" released alongside remixes by 16 Bit and Spor, and a collaboration with ESKMO dubbed Eskamon. Eskamon has released a single "Fine Objects". In January 2011, his artist page was updated on Ninja Tune website, announcing a new album entitled ISAM, as well as a Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory remix album. After being leaked by a journalist, ISAM was released on April 20, 2011. As its extension, in May 2012, Tobin released the Boxset, prominent of its form of a mechanical press. As a set of 15 different physical carriers, it contains remixes, cover versions and re-interpretations of tracks from ISAM, along with Tobin's earliest audio experiments, film and television scores, as well as deleted bootlegs. The second album under Two Fingers, Stunt Rhythms, was a solo effort by Amon Tobin and was designed by Inventory Studio and released worldwide by Big Dada Recordings in 2012. On April 18, 2015, Amon Tobin announced Dark Jovian, an EP, and his first release under his name in four years.

In February 2019, Amon Tobin's website announced a new album, Fear in a Handful of Dust, to be released in April 2019 on a new label, Nomark Records. The album's release on April 26, 2019, marked the end of an 8 year long hiatus in new studio LP album releases under Tobin's name (his previous release being ISAM in 2011). Throughout the remainder of 2019, Tobin would also release three singles under his Two Fingers alias: You Ain't Down, 296 Rhythm, and LED Moon Rhythm. On July 26, 2019, Tobin released the album Time to Run under a new alias known as Only Child Tyrant. In September 2019, Tobin announced the Nomark Club, an annual subscription service that grants access to all of Tobin's material as it is released, including some member-exclusive content (the material is delivered via Bandcamp's subscription service). A supporter-exclusive extended play album titled Fine Strips of Violence was released in tandem with the announcement. Long Stories, which arrived October 2019, was made in parallel with Fear in a Handful of Dust and features prominent use of a broken Omnichord. In December 2019, Tobin released a two-track Nomark Club-exclusive album titled Nine Bars Back under the alias of Cujo—one that had not been used since the release of Adventures in Foam in 1996. Tobin released The World As We Know It in July 2020 under the alias Figueroa, which marked a departure in Tobin's usual instrumental style, as it was his first major release to feature prominent vocal work. The album's lyrics were performed by Tobin himself with technical guidance from producer Sylvia Massy. Tobin describes the lyrics as being rather ambiguous, stating in an interview that "I want the feeling of the songs to be the priority, rather than the specific meaning." West Coast Love Stories, the debut album by new alias Stone Giants, "celebrates the relationship between voice and machine from an altogether different perspective - humans and electronics pooling resources to explore themes of love and being none the wiser for it." The "cinematic and apocalyptic" How Do You Live, released under Tobin's name, arrived in September 2021. In February 2021, Tobin was announced to be involved in the soundtracking of the Meow Wolf Omega Mart installation, along with Beach House, Brian Eno, Santigold, and others. Tobin's soundtrack to the installation, A Living Room (Music from Meow Wolf's Omega Mart) was released on September 23, 2022, on his Nomark Records label as a single-sided vinyl record with an etching on the reverse. As Two Fingers, a trio of collaborative singles with the German producer Muadeep came out in 2022: Blood Moon, Banished, and Lost Gods, leading to the trio's album Cronos. Also in 2022, the Only Child Tyrant alias released a pair of singles: HoneyCup Troll and Make Better Friends. The Nomark Records label released the Nomark Selects V.1 compilation album in 2023, and the Nomark Selects V.2 compilation album in 2025, both containing singles hand-picked by the Nomark Club members.

• Illustration — Tobin performing at l'Ososphère music festival in Strasbourg Tobin began performing live shows in clubs with other Ninja Tune artists after releasing his second album, Bricolage. His shows generally contained music that he had produced during his career, mixed with modified songs from drum and bass, hip-hop, or other genres. Because his music was entirely produced in a studio with electronics, Tobin was not interested in adapting his music to suit a Live PA incorporating musicians. He instead used turntables which he felt had more in common with his approach to music production. He is known for building Dolby Digital 7.1 surround sound speaker systems for his performances. In 2011, Tobin developed a live show in support of the album ISAM, fitting his criteria for a performance that is both live and purely electronic. He told Wired Magazine "The idea was to integrate myself, quite literally, into an audio and visual presentation of the album,". It incorporates the use of new video mapping techniques that are projected onto a large cubic structure from which Tobin performs. The show has been met with international acclaim; Vice Magazine's Creators Project described it as "revolutionizing the live music experience". Tobin has performed individual shows in many countries including tours in Europe, Australia, Japan, and the United States. His 2003 live performance in Melbourne, Australia was used for the fourth album in Ninja Tune's Solid Steel series because Tobin was not available to record a studio mix at the time. Many songs from the original recording were omitted because of copyright issues with the original artists, including the R&B group Destiny's Child. A second Solid Steel album Foley Room Recorded Live in Brussels was recorded in Brussels at the Ancienne Belgique in 2007, and was released for free in November 2008. According to Tobin's official website, "After months of back and forth and despite everyone's best efforts the mix was in danger of being edited into the ground to accommodate big labels and publishers. Rather than release a compromised version commercially, the decision was made to give it away for free instead."

Amon Tobin is classed in the genre intelligent dance music. Recorded with the occupation record producer. Recorded with the occupation disc jockey. Classed in the genre trip hop. Recorded as disc jockey, composer, record producer and musician. Established in Library of Congress under no2003048004. Established in Discogs under 322.