Amon Tobin / Bricolage by Sean Kennedy courtesy Ninja Tune Records Imagine a clear, starry summer night, the Capitol's slippery silhouette looming out of the blackness so close it seems you can touch it. You're standing outside in the courtyard at Buzz, the weekly Friday night party at the Ballroom in Washington, D.C. Then imagine a bricolage of sounds coasting over you, an aural landscape so rich, so dense, that you're seized headlong from your cigarette breather into the air, your body moving to beats ricocheting around. Imagine wanting to dance forever. When Amon Tobin took to the turntables at Buzz's Sting 9 party in June as part of the Ninja Tune record label tour, that's how I felt. Hearing his new album Bricolage, that sensation is only heightened. This boy's got mad skills. Bricolage is Amon Tobin's debut under his own name, having released a few previous records under the name Cujo on the British labels HOS and Ninebar. Before that, he traveled around, from his birthplace, Rio de Janeiro, to the U.K., Portugal, and Madeira, making a living as a street musician until he returned to England in 1994 and became a DJ. The result is one bizarre brew of an album. Bricolage takes its name from the term "bricoleur," appropriated by the influential 20th-century anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. Tobin, in turn, used the word "bricolage" to mean a "process which uses given material, given signifiers (a text, a chord sequence), but which creates from these signifiers a new reality which is not given." Indeed, Tobin takes traditional jazz instruments like saxophone, trumpet, upright bass, and drum kit, offsets them with computer-produced bass and drum beats, throws in samples, found noise, and a variety of electronic effects, then scrambles the whole mess up to create a completely new, completely-as-yet-unheard-of kaleidoscope of sound. At first listen, the opening track "Stoney Street" strikes one as unoriginal, especially coming from a member of the famed Ninja Tune crew (which includes Coldcut, DJ Food, and Funki Porcini, among others). It's a standard jazz riff done straight-up with a tenor saxophone, plucked upright bass, and drums. In light of the other tracks, though, it seems less a recycled idea than an inside joke, as if he's sneering. "This is how it was done, but -- get ready -- this is how I do it." To extend his definition of bricolage, old-school jazz is the signifier, but Tobin's signified means something entirely different from the signified of [insert random jazz legend's name here]. Tracks like "The Nasty" bear this out, with its moody mix of ethereal vibraphone chimes, distorted saxophone wails and brooding upright bass that progresses into industrial noise. "The New York Editor" offers a more provocative look on traditional jazz as it kicks off with a soundbyte that asks, "Is this thing called jazz?" Other tracks include the single "Creatures," which begins with ringing bells and a bittersweet piano riff, then shifts into a fast breakbeat until the soundbyte "That cat is something" interrupts, after which the bass starts to race. "Chomp Samba" can only be described as an insane, no-holds-barred attack on the drums. And the last track, "Mission," couldn't be more different from "Stoney Street"; it's as if Tobin's creating some new sort of jazz, paying respects to its roots yet breaking out new aural horizons of his own. Amon Tobin. This cat's something.

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