Triple Science: Amon Tobin's Abducted Rave

17th of June, 2024

Out From Out Where is Amon Tobin’s best album, and it is so for the ways in which it understands how genre is articulated. IDM is often a vehicle for individual sonic experimentalism, where artists familiar with certain dance musics discover a set of production techniques that allow them to chase more and more novel sounds. The methods for sound design might be complicated to the point of technical inaccessibility, but the ethos of experimentalism is often childlike, in the sense once described by György Kurtág. He writes:

“The idea of composing Játékok [Hungarian: Games] was suggested by children playing spontaneously, children for whom the piano still means a toy. They experiment with it, caress it, attack it and run their fingers over it. They pile up seemingly disconnected sounds, and if this happens to arouse their musical instinct they look consciously for some of the harmonies found by chance and keep repeating them.”

This will sound familiar to anyone who has listened to Amon Tobin, but his compositions work (or don’t work) according to his willingness to temper his childlike experimentalism not with his technical wizardry but with his interest in exploring genre without abandoning it. In most of the sound design of Out From Out Where the pursuit is not in the sound in and of itself (or itself against the rest) but in the situation that will see a new sort of sound be born and breathe easily. Listening to the album one gets this impression best in the hip-hop inspired compositions; for me this would be Searchers and Rosies, though everyone seems to like different tracks best. These tracks are the best teachers, they make learning how to listen to his style most intuitive, but once one has this familiarity one might gravitate to other compositions.

Triple Science manages to transcend what might have been a more juvenile preoccupation with speed that one finds in breakcore by forming its breaks from whispers and glottal stops. Its breaks always sound like they’re more implied than present, as phasing gives us only the formants and outlines of what should sound like a drum kit without any of the body and acoustic detail. A whisper is the articulation of breath as if it were a voiced sound: and in the jargon of linguistics the vocal cords are abducted so they do not vibrate. It would be easy to call the breaks of Triple Science an empty signifier of drums, or an empty signifier of drum and bass or of speed and rave in general. But I can only hear them as rave that has been abducted and run through teeth and cartilage floating in space without a throat or larynx in attendance.

Further Reading:

Forty-Four UK Dance Tunes From the Noughties: Part 1
(Slip & Slide) Suicide: Vocal Anonymity in Dance Music
The Historicity of Valley of the Shadows