I don't know about you all but I miss the websites of 2007. There was so much variation and unbridled creativity. I remembered stumbling upon this page in 2007 while looking up Amon Tobin's soundtrack to Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. I can't remember the last time I saw a musician launch such a beautiful interactive site for their album release. And here it is in 2024, lovingly preserved and still functional on Internet Archive.
I was amazed that the site still runs, apparently still using the same engine.
But it seems that it was a flash site (of course), and archive.org seems to replace Flash Player with "Ruffle" [1]. Either that, or someone of Tobin's team replaced Flash with Ruffle >= 2019.
Spliter Cell: Chaos Theory introduced me to Amon Tobin. Top Gear also heavily played Amon Tobin when showcasing cars, until the BBC had enough of Jeremy Clarkson. Whoever picked the music for the show was a big fan.
Yes! Chaos Theory was my introduction to Tobin as well. As a teenager, I had no interest in music before then, being exposed only to my mom's soft rock CD collections and whatever pop music used to play on the radio. I was surprised to discover later that his music was used for the Toonami intros on Cartoon Network so maybe I was primed to like him before then. [1] That took me down an entire rabbithole of "intelligent dance music" (Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, etc.) and today I mostly enjoy PC Music / Hyperpop which is similarly avant-garde with the way it uses samples or completely synthetic sounds (e.g. SOPHIE, Cashmere Cat, 100 Gecs, AG Cook).
Tobin did a really wonderful interview in 2008 that made me really appreciate electronic music more when I read it regarding how drum and bass is truly avant garde given its manipulative use of samples rather than simply looping beats or lifting long samples because they need a saxophone somewhere: [2]
> Rusty: It seems like now, your more recent music has been more synthetic, more digital and less samples? Is that correct? Or are you just tweaking the samples so much?
> Amon Tobin: It's really just about manipulation now. Like I said, back in the early nineties, it was interesting just to take samples as they were and see what you could do with them. And now, the technology has advanced so much more and there's a lot more room for maneuvers between synthesizers and synthetic processes applied to recorded material and sampled material. So there's much more of a hybrid going on now as far as I'm concerned and so my music is maybe now a little bit less easy to define in terms of is it sampled best or is it synthesized or is it just, you know, I guess, electronic, really.
> ...
> Rusty: I know. I was going back through some of my older CD's from that period, which I hadn't listened to in a while, and I was like "That was really good." I mean, it's super stylistic, so you tend to burn out if you hear a little too much of it.
> Amon Tobin: Well, the interesting thing about drum and bass is that it was, to me it felt like it was a genuinely forward-thinking type of music. People were really trying to do new things. They weren't trying to be nostalgic or relive some golden era of music in the seventies. It was all about 'Let's try and make something truly futuristic and do things with production that had never been possible before.' And that spirit still remains, as small as the genre is. It's influenced a lot of other types of music which are much more in the forefront now. So, you know, I think it's normal. These things go in cycles. Things become, you know, they become very much in the spotlight.
A very modernist take, pushing boundaries for its own sake. Contrast with pop music which is exactly the opposite, being rearrangements of standards.
Somehow I find his music is perfect for working with code. It feels like it really meshes with my mind in a way I've never found with other artists.
Also was sad to see he recently retired from live shows, but am glad I got to see him live several times several times in San Franciso. He shows were always mind-blowing and it's such a pleasure to see a master at work. Plus I respected how humble he was; his talent is far far beyond artists who are more financially successful, and he avoids the spotlight. I wish there was more available about how his mind works, because it must be very unique.
It's sad, but unfortunately it's kind of like the whole "vulkan" issue: allow a great tool to degenerate that people can actually easily use (Flash) and then replace it by much more difficult to use and/or less well supported technologies (HTML5)
The issue is, the training and support for similar projects in JS and CSS took such a long time (and honestly is still nowhere near the ease of use of Flash) that by just a few years later interactive websites became a throwback anyway. Now, if anyone were to do that, it would carry a dreadful air of nostalgia.
That said, perhaps they would have carried on if not for Adobe basically refusing to fix Flash, but I think by the time Steve Jobs' note was published it was already out of vogue. The end of skeuomorphism and the era of "flat design everything" was concurrent, and these were easily accommodated by contemporary web technologies without Flash. I think that's also an important point, there was an era where such websites as Amon Tobin's were considered basically old-fashioned and lethargic, and everyone was genuinely very excited about turning everything into flat design.
