Amon Tobin's Permutation is an incredible fusion of jazz and natural-sounding electronica; it's a surprisingly seemless pairing that sees the two square off in what sounds like the dark, shady alleyways of a 1950s detective story. Trench coats aside, the drums are what stand out on this album, and even though they have been expertly spliced together, they retain an organic feel and a phenomenal energy that would make even Ginger Baker's head spin.
Bursts of sweeping strings shimmer throughout, flowing over the up-tempo, wandering lines of a double-bass and a slithering piano as Tobin creates his own brilliant waves of percussion, typically kicking them into a frenzy of drum'n'bass rhythms before smoothing them back out to a dreamy xylophone finish. This is what jazz would sound like in the fictional underworld of William Burroughs: cut-up, altogether unreal, but simply mesmerising.
Starting out from "Like Regular Chickens" (with the appropriate sound-bite from David Lynch's Eraserhead), by the time we've reached the fourth track there's already been a foray of scintillating flows: everything from tumbling drum solos to the sinister rushes of gritty, industrial-like funk, often closed out with haunting, spacey breakdowns. Representative of the overall effect of the exhilarating bricolage of samples on this album, there's something about "Sordid" that conjures up the image of Laurence of Arabia crossing the desert on the back of a camel, as are there hints everywhere of music suitable for a scene straight from Star Wars' Mos Eisley Cantina. From the squawking horns of Dizzie Gallespie, or sounds like that from an old Warner Bros. cartoon, a brilliant, mysterious catalogue of music is being executed to full effect in what has to be a landmark album in electronica.
Taken from http://www.seewhatyouhear.com/
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