Amon Tobin Brazilian Singer From Rio de Janeiro

Amon Tobin is a Brazilian electronic musician, composer, producer and disc jockey. Born Amon Adonai Santos de Araújo Tobin on 7 February 1972 in Rio de Janeiro, he is known for building his music out of manipulated sound sources, and for film and video game scores. His records have appeared mainly on the Ninja Tune label, and he has worked under several aliases.

Early life

Tobin left Brazil with his family at the age of two and lived in Morocco, the Netherlands, London, Portugal and Madeira. As a teenager he settled in Brighton, England, which remained his home until 2002. There he began making electronic music in his bedroom with samplers and a four-track recorder. While taking a photography course at a university in Brighton, he answered a magazine call from the London label Ninebar for demo tapes, and Ninebar signed him in 1996.

Career

Under the name Cujo, borrowed from a Stephen King novel, he released a run of 12-inch singles whose tracks were later gathered on his first album, Adventures in Foam, issued by Ninebar in 1996. Ninja Tune signed him later that year, now as Amon Tobin, after artists such as DJ Food and Funki Porcini noticed the record. In 1997 the label acquired the licences and re-released the album with a bonus disc. Bricolage (1997) and Permutation (1998) followed, and Supermodified (2000) became his best-known early album.

In 2002 he moved to Montreal and recorded Out from Out Where there, his first album made mainly in a professional studio. From it he began to rely more on his own field recordings. In 2004 Ubisoft Montreal commissioned him to score Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, and he divided each track into several sections of different intensity so the game could switch between them. Ninja Tune issued the score as an album in 2005. His 2007 album Foley Room used samples that he recorded himself, with sources including motorbikes, insects and water from a tap, and featured contributions from the Kronos Quartet. A live recording from Brussels followed in 2008.

With the producer Doubleclick he formed Two Fingers, whose self-titled album came out in 2009 and whose second, Stunt Rhythms, followed in 2012. He wrote music for the game inFamous in 2009 and for Splinter Cell: Conviction in 2010. ISAM was released on 20 April 2011 with a live show projected onto a large cubic structure. A Splinter Cell remix album appeared the same year, and the Boxset of 15 physical items followed in 2012. Dark Jovian arrived in 2015, his first release under his own name for four years.

In 2019 he began releasing through his own label, Nomark Records, with Fear in a Handful of Dust, issued on 26 April, and he started the Nomark Club, a subscription service on Bandcamp. That year he also released music as Only Child Tyrant and revived the Cujo name. Later aliases include Figueroa, whose The World As We Know It (2020) was his first major release with prominent vocals, and Stone Giants. How Do You Live was released in September 2021, and in 2022 he put out a soundtrack for the Meow Wolf installation Omega Mart. Two Fingers also worked with the producer Muadeep on the album Cronos.

His music has been used in films including The Italian Job and 21, and he scored the Hungarian film Taxidermia (2006) and the documentary Pax Americana and the Weaponization of Space (2009). Two Fingers composed the theme for the series Orphan Black in 2013.

Recognition

Reviewers received his early albums warmly. Pitchfork gave Bricolage a 10 out of 10 in 1999 and Supermodified 9.1. The Chaos Theory score was described by Tiny Mix Tapes as marking a new era for game soundtracks. His live shows, in which he built surround-sound speaker systems and later the ISAM stage, were praised internationally. His discography totals seventeen albums on record, from 1996 to 2019.

Public roles

Through Nomark Records and the Nomark Club, Tobin releases his own music and collaborations directly to subscribers. His work in this format has included albums with G Jones, Ivy Lab, Little Snake, Thys and Muadeep.