No one can define the music – not his record label, not his listeners, not even himself. But no matter how you describe it, Amon Tobin is doing it again with the jazzy drum-n-bass style he unleashed just three short years ago.

After returning to the U.K. from Brazil in the early ‘90s, Tobin was seduced by the strange and choppy jungle sounds of Grooverider and Goldie. Although he wasn’t much of a DJ, he started experimenting with a sequencer and a Casio sampling keyboard.

Soon, he had created several ambient singles under the name Cujo for HOS, and his debut full-length album, The Adventures in Foam (Ninebar Records), soon followed. He switched to Ninja Tune in late ’96, produced the jazz-happy Permutation under his real name, and toured with The Herbaliser and DJ Food.

Last winter, the Brazilian-born Tobin produced the hauntingly eclectic Supermodified in his Brighton apartment – the place where he gets inspired by jazz greats like Louis Belson and Gene Krupa, musicians who thrash drums like scratch jocks shred vinyl. Drawing from these crazy jazz breaks has allowed Tobin to remodel drum-n-bass in the guise of a ’50s beatnik with a goatee and an amphetamine problem.

Supermodified peers from the ambient to the strange, like the spooky sounding "Slowly" that slides phantom horns over simple guitar riffs; or "Golfer vrs Boxer" which samples a motorcycle revving over eerie vocals and mad jungle breaks. It makes you wanna rip out someone’s seat belt and fasten it to your listening couch, a strange and funky experience Tobin thinks carefully to create.

"I’ve got a whole load of range of different of breaks and I’ll want to make new breaks with these. So I’ll chop a kick and a snare with one break, then some shuffles without a break and then various bits of percussion and a whole range of different styles of drumming," he says. "I’ll try and program them so they’re fluid and they can make one break."

Tobin says his set-up is simple but solid: a Cubase VST sequencer, an Akai S6000 sampler and software like TC FireWorx effects. But it’s the third-party plug-ins that Tobin depends on to provide the crazy sounds that layer his percussion-induced bytes.

"They’re really useful because you can take a break, stick it in Cubase and put it through some insane piece of software. You sample it back and work from there."

Perhaps it’s his tripped-out sampling style that attracts so many listeners and critics’ accolades. On Supermodified, Tobin used a revving motorbike to create riding effects and a tuba to simulate sub-bass booms. He realizes that these sounds don’t make people scream to dance at his live sets, but it always makes their ears bleed for more. And Tobin figures they’ll keep hearing those d-n-b samples long after it’s fashionable.

"Even if the genre itself goes underground, its affected the way music is produced because for so many people, especially for me, it’s the way I chop my breaks," he says. "I think it’s really influential."

– Zack Medicoff