DJ Amon Tobin, UK’s Doubleckick collaborate
To call Brazilian-born DJ and full-time beatsmith Amon Tobin anything other than a mastermind would be to do him a disservice. After all, this is an artist who constructed an entire electronic album without a single instrument or sample he didn’t create from scratch (“ISAM”).
Throughout his career, he has been unwilling to compromise his radical vision of where he wants electronica to go next.
Thankfully for his more casual listeners, there’s Two Fingers, Tobin’s hip-hop influenced side project with United Kingdom producer Doubleclick. Here, the experimental musician can loosen his proverbial collar and focus on simply churning out speaker-melting tracks.
Since “Stunt Rhythms” is inspired by the innovative culture of earlier hip-hop, it would be a failure of an album if Two Fingers didn’t up the ante with its sound.
Enter “Stripe Rhythm,” the album’s powerful opener. The track comes off as a devastating throwdown to current mainstream hip-hop culture, when a tinny drum pattern at its onset is drowned out by subwoofer-rattling thunderclaps of bombastic bass and beats.
It’s clear within the first five seconds that Two Fingers have upped their game and in doing so have developed quite a different sound.
In a lot of ways, the new sound of the Two Fingers project fulfills the promise of dubstep — the kind of low, sordid electronica that could spontaneously combust at any given second — minus the cheap and tedious trick that is “the wub.”
Here, we have heavy beats layered together with low synthesizers which snarl, buzz and screech with such raw, animalistic intensity that listeners can’t help but fall prey to them. And like an animal, the music of “Stunt Rhythms” behaves as if it has a mind of its own.
The tracks morph and shift, often going on arbitrary asides, and then, just before falling completely off the rails, they snap back into their established rhythms with renewed vigor.
This is what the “stunt” aspect of the album’s title means. Each track seems to be experimenting within the bounds of the beat, daring to pull entire layers of sound out from under itself at a moment’s notice, entering free fall for as long as possible, and then catching the listener at the last possible second on its bass and beat hook.
These stylistic flourishes may seem chaotic and unnecessary, but they add to an already masterful level of audio production. And hardcore Amon Tobin fans needn’t worry, as his knack for infusing his tracks with evocative urban sounds is still on point.
The Doppler-effect synthesizers of “Deep Jinx” bring to mind a science-fiction superhighway of hovering cars zipping by while, “Elmer Rhythm’s” subterranean echoes of percussion conjure up the yawning void of a subway tunnel. And with the volume cranked, the effect of all of this is explosive.
The full album contains 21 tracks in total, and yet the whole thing moves along at a breakneck pace.
Take “Defender Rhythm” for example, a track that opens with a chiptune-esque synthesizer laying down a lightning fast, completely silly melody that wouldn’t sound out of place coming from a “Galaga” arcade cabinet, and yet, it systematically layers it with claps, and several equally fast counter-melodies, effectively turning it into one of the most intense tracks on the album. And it does all this in less than two and a half minutes. And then, boom, it’s on to the next track.
Two Fingers’ sophomore album is a no-holds-barred, relentless thrill ride that not only manages to top 2009’s debut album, but propels beyond it and into the stratosphere.
“Stunt Rhythms” is bolder, heavier and more confident (almost arrogantly so) than its predecessor in almost every way. As an album, it’s not perfect; it lacks connective tissue to give it cohesion and sounds more like a cobbled-together playlist.
However, at the end of the day it’s just nitpicking at an album that any fan of electronic music simply must listen to for themselves. Just good luck finding a speaker system that can handle it.