Subtle Arts - thoughtful music for troubled times...
acoustic, electronic, ambient, organic

Welcome to Subtle Arts. This site presents the work of Canadian-born composer and multi-instrumentalist tobias tinker. If your browser supports Flash, click the image at left to start hearing some of my music right away; proceed to the Demo Reel pages for a little more information on what you're hearing, or just let it play while you explore the rest of the site using the navigation buttons at left.

The bulk of the site (including the Broken Saints Soundtracks!) is in the CDs section (click on the icons below), which contains product-specific areas for each of the titles I currently have available. Some areas are more elaborate than others, but all contain images, links to audio samples and descriptive text about my music and the ideas and issues which inform it.

Click to go to the main 'Subtle Arts' CD pages

There's a lot in a name (and perhaps even more in a logo!), and 'Subtle Arts' says a lot about what I am trying to do with my music. It is mostly instrumental and electronic, entirely self-produced, often ambient or atmospheric, but always intended to be engaging and to provoke active listening - I am not much into 'wallpaper'. I am very much into the subtle, dynamic interplay of acoustic and electronic sounds and textures; between the spontanaeity, depth and physicality of real instruments played by real people, and the precision and infinite possibilites of digital editing and computer-assisted sound design. Almost everything I do involves these juxtapositions.

This website is intended to present an overview of my work of interest to both the casual listener and to the media professional looking for original musical content. Although the focus is on my compositional work and recorded output, I am also quite comfortable in a performance context. I have been onstage in a wide variety of contexts for about twenty years, starting in my teens with rock and pop bands, moving through jazz and into folk and world music... just about everything from solo piano and jazz combos to accompanying singers to balkan, klezmer and belly-dance shows. Following a four year stint with Germany's favorite dinner circus theatre extravaganza, Pomp Duck and Circumstance (over 800 full-length, fast-paced and totally professional shows in 4 years, with music ranging from baroque, opera, jazz and rock to high-energy Irish folk and original show music - and performances for celebrities such as Sting, Peter Falk, Mickey Rooney, and Larry Hagman), I am now active on the Berlin jazz scene with my solo piano work and a number of original and standards-oriented ensembles. For more details, see my biography page .

So, have fun, enjoy the music, hopefully think about things a little, and feel free to drop me a line with any feedback you may have concerning the site or its contents. Also, feel free to visit my blog (which I will try to keep fairly current with personal and professional goings-on) or my promotional pages at UBL (the Ultimate Band List) or MySpace.

- tobias 'at' subtlearts.com

About the logo:

I designed the Subtle Arts logo while rebuilding the site after a 'crash' of sorts. It is vaguely snail-like, a combination of a kind of 'exponential pinwheel' - the triangles expanding outwards on the left half - and a rounded spiral, in which the text is bounded in the text versions (the official text font for Subtle Arts is 'Dimurphic', licensed as freeware and designed by Graham Meade, used with much appreciation). The whole thing has a kind of 'techno-organic' feel to it for me - the sharp angles and linearity of the 'pinwheel' standing for technology, theory and technique, but with the recursive logic that many life-forms seem to follow.. Fittingly, then, the 'technological' spiral (left brain) is governed by a strict mathematical relationship (the adjacent sides of each triangle take their length from the hypotenuse of the previous one), whereas the rounded spiral (right brain) was pretty much just done by eye...