People here at work have been saving up their iTunes Pepsi caps for me. I think I’ve gotten like 6 free songs out of the deal. Last night I downloaded “Stoney Street” by Amon Tobin. His sense of texture and rhythm are glorious. It’s as catchy and hypnotic as anything since “Long Cool Woman” by The Hollies. I ended up replaying it about 5 times. And then this morning I got out my VISA and bought “Bricolage” online.

I love Amon Tobin. And I could kick myself for not going to see him when he was at Empty Bottle a month or two ago. Ryan went to the show and all he could say was, “It was dull. He was just up there behind a bunch of machines.” But damn, the music must have been great. I see that he’s coming into town again this month as part of a multi-artist tour at the Metro. I don’t like seeing shows at the Metro that much. It’s one of those wide-and-narrow theatres with terrible acoustics and the kind of annoying audience that loves carrying on loud, pointless conversations the whole show. Still.

Why do I like him so much? Well, he takes my own inate sense of eclecticsm and blows it up to its logical conclusion: utter eclecism both resembles ALL and NONE the sum of its parts. When you smash up so many ‘disparate’ materials, they inevitably GO TOGETHER. It’s a fusion. And when you do it with as much artfulness and ingenuity as Tobin does, there’s an exquisite harmony and rightness to the end result. And it doesn’t quite feel like any other kind of music. It’s not really jazz, not really techno, or IDM, or D&B, or whatever other labels you can think up. It’s just Amon Tobin.