Talkback: Tobin Jones

Mixer and engineer Tobin Jones knew he wanted to work in the recording industry from an early age. “When I was a kid, I would look at the back of my dad’s records,” he remembers. “I’d see people’s names: assistants, runners, all sorts. And I thought: ‘At some point I will be able to pull a record that I really love off the shelf, and — however small — I will have been involved in some way.’ That was my only real aspiration.” Sure enough, he soon began recording rappers in his bedroom, before moving on to assistant and technician jobs wherever he could find them. Fast‑forward to the present, and Jones has worked with a raft of boundary‑pushing artists from electronic powerhouse Powell to Japanese psych‑rockers Bo Ningen.

At the moment I can’t stop listening to…

You just want one? A record I’m really enjoying at the moment is by Party Dozen, Crime In Australia. They’re Aussies. It’s a two piece: drums and sax. It’s really cool. Like, vocals going through the horn so she’s playing through loads of effects and things. And that’s where the vocals come from. It’s all quite rough and ready but it’s really vibey, really intense. It’s quite unique, but also kind of familiar at the same time, really energetic. I would definitely recommend seeing them live! I think Nick Cave did the vocals for a track on one of their last albums.

The other one I’m listening to is much heavier than I would normally go for, a band called Sumac; their album The Healer. It’s only got four tracks and I think it’s over 60 minutes long! It’s got some elements of free jazz mixed with, like, heavier stoner‑y doom metal. From what I can tell, it’s pretty much all recorded live — maybe with some overdubs. It’s heavy, but not in a way that I would describe as metal heavy. It’s tonally heavy. It’s absolutely amazing.

The artist I’d most like to record  

There are probably quite a few. One that springs to mind, just because I think she is like an incredible artist and very interesting, is Tanya Tagaq. She’s a Canadian Inuk throat singer, from northern Canada — well within the Arctic Circle. And she does a lot of throat singing, but mixed with electronics and brass. It’s absolutely incredible. I’ve never heard anything like it. She’s extremely creative with it. She’s amalgamating this experimental electronic music with band music, and mixing that with this incredible throat singing... and she’s got a conventionally beautiful singing voice as well! She’ll go from very high sung notes into this amazing drone that goes on in her throat. I also find her book Split Tooth very inspiring. It’s sort of semi‑biographical, but also quite dreamy. I find her very inspiring, I think she’s an artist who is doing something completely different to anyone else. When I hear people making music that doesn’t sound like anything else, something that I really don’t understand, it makes me want to know why. And it makes me really want to get behind it.

The first thing I look for in...