Amon Adonai Santos de Araújo Tobin — better known as just Amon Tobin — has come a long way in the past two decades. In 1995, he released his debut record, Curfew, under the name Cujo, his first and only pseudonym. It was a four-track EP of catchy, head-nodding instrumental hip-hop built from breaks and samples lifted from jazz, funk, and soul records. Coming hot on the heels of similar works by artists like Massive Attack and the Bay Area's own DJ Shadow, it was a new, exciting sound, dubbed trip-hop by the British music press, and Tobin was at its forefront.
Tobin spent the next decade, more or less, mastering the trip-hop sound. The genre's breakout artists, like the aforementioned Massive Attack, DJ Shadow, or U.N.K.L.E., seemed to run out of steam as soon as people took notice of them, bogged down by mainstream success or simply running out of ideas. Tobin, meanwhile, was homing in on a certain sound with successive albums, each one more cinematic and polished. (1998's Permutation, in particular, is a masterpiece, a perfect balance of stoned grooves and manic kineticism.)
In the aughts, Tobin switched gears entirely. In 2004, he wrote the soundtrack to a videogame, Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, that foreshadowed this new direction; by 2011, upon the release of the album ISAM (and accompanying larger-than-life visual artwork), the transformation was complete. Still built entirely from samples, his music is now not so much about a groove as an experience, in particular the live experience: The complete ISAM show, which you'll see at Outside Lands, includes an enormous cubic structure, fully projection-mapped, that undulates and gyrates in tune with his music. In short, it's probably not like anything else you've seen before.
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