By Sean Manning
If the advent of sample culture has taught us anything, it’s that you can’t just slap two and two together and expect to make something transcendent. For every Grey Album there are countless forgettable mash-ups attempting to play “What if?” with pop’s back catalogue and even more pointless remixes. And while rock purists may decry anyone who can’t barre a chord to save their life as a phony, real cut-and-paste collage—when given the proper attention to detail and refinement—can be magic.
Brazilian-born DJ Amon Tobin crashed an otherwise typical set of hip hop and funk spinning at San Francisco’s Mezzanine on Friday night with an abrasive wall of white noise and grinding beats—all in glorious surround sound. It was an appropriate beginning—a palette cleanser of sorts, and a call to the audience that you shouldn’t be dancing anymore. The wall of sound was embellished with audio snippets of a children’s choir to great apocalyptic effect before transitioning into “Esther’s”—a powerful and aggressive track from Tobin’s recent album The Foley Room, which darts fragments of micro-percussion around a sample of a revved engine. The result was something exhilarating and somewhat mysterious, because despite his command of the stage, Tobin seemed to be generating an impossible amount of sound.
As a sound artist more than a breakbeat fiend, Tobin may have seemed a little bit out of place at the Mezzanine, but his performance showed that while everyone and their mom may have access to GarageBand these days, true envelope pushing sound collage remains much more elusive, and, inherently, much more interesting.