3 out of 5

Label: Nomark Records

Produced by: Amon Tobin

While it’s too dismissive to say that the sheen of notoriety of a Nomark collection has dimmed somewhat… kinda? But it’s not directly that, more that the longer Amon Tobin has gotten into this venture of crowd-funding his own label, and doing regular drops of digital singles under various pseudonyms – Two Fingers and Cujo, for example – the “better” he’s gotten at it; the more procedural it can become. We’re somewhat spoiled by that, as Tobin’s mastery of atmospheric sounds, blended to cutting, funky beats is truly unparalleled, and the last few years of work dotted across this comp show an absolute mastery of production, expertly blending sounds from across the years of jungle and experimental and hip-hop releases into an always compelling, always grooving meet-in-the-middle synthesis. But again: exactly: this has now developed into its own sound, making the divide between the Tobin tracks and Two Fingers and etc. less so, maybe accounting for why the majority of the tunes (eight out of ten) just appear under Amon’s own name.

I do want to emphasize that we’re still dealing with high caliber work overall, I just think the massive churn of creativity we saw in Nomark’s first few years has earned Amon some downtime, and so the singles on vol. 2 are – to me – more to keep creative juices flowing; we hear quite a bit of recycled beats from ISAM and onward, although fascinatingly sort of “down”-mixed to an overall chill vibe. Sequencing has still been kept in check, opening up on toe-tapping click clack Foley-era; sinking into some dashes of atmospherics; hitting back with beats on a Two Fingers track; and then somewhat cycling through that until we hit the end.

Having this stuff on a physical format is a gift either way, even if this second singles set is more fitting as background music than the Tobin album you put on to drop jaws. We’re blessed that background music can be this good.