Amon Tobin settles into abstract electronica

His bridge
By REYAN ALI  |  September 5, 2012

at1
BENEATH THE SURFACE Amon Tobin's ISAM is a strangely soothing Rube Goldberg contraption: bass breaks that have watery explosions, modified wind chimes, and sleek blasts of 22nd-century synthesizer. 

If his 2011 off-the-cuff comment is any proof, Amon Tobin is terrible at resisting the urge to prod a proverbial beehive. A few months before Ninja Tune issued ISAM in May of last year, the Brazil-born, San Francisco-based musician uploaded a stream of his seventh record to Soundcloud along with annotations discussing the work. His first note attached to the first track contained a fantastically passive-aggressive jab at former and would-be fans: "Anyone looking for jazzy brks should look elsewhere at this point or earlier : ). It's 2011 folks, welcome to the future."

Since his start working in electronic music in the late '90s, first as Cujo and then under his real name, Tobin has made serious aesthetic changes, going from jazz-bred horn breaks, digestible bass lines, and catchy, club-friendly beats to mysterious, brain-bending compositions that resemble sonic installations as much as songs. "I know that when you make music over a period of time, people have certain expectations," he says by phone. "I'm really used to that because that's always been the case. Every time I make a new record, the camp is split. There's people who wish that it sounded like the old records and other people who don't think it's different enough. In the end, you just realize that there's no way you can please people. You really have to just do exactly what you want and just hope that people dig it."

In more specific terms, ISAM continues the confounding sound and instrument design elements Tobin last explored on 2007's Foley Room, which combined relatively conventional music with manipulated field recordings of animals and insects. ISAM — for Invented Sounds Applied to Music — is a strangely soothing Rube Goldberg contraption, made up of bass breaks that have watery explosions, modified wind chimes, sleek blasts of 22nd-century synthesizer, brooding strings, and vocals that were recorded in cavernous digital tombs. Oddly punctuated gaps of silence are everywhere, adding a disjointedness to ISAM that often prevents it from feeling like conventional "music."

Tobin is notoriously for keeping his instrumentation methods under wraps, since he enjoys reading how others interpret them, but he has revealed that this is his first sample-free album. "What I've always done essentially is transform sounds, and try and take things that I hear around me and develop them into a form I can work with, and feel like I have some affinity with," he says. "My starting point was taking pieces of recorded music and rearranging it into different forms. That led on to processing the sound as well as rearranging and editing it. Then, it got to a point where the final result was so far removed from its origins that the sample issue wasn't really relevant, and that was a long time ago already."

1  |  2  |   next >
Related: Say Anything | Anarchy, My Dear, Bloc Party regain their post-punk edge, Photos: Brandon Flowers at the House of Blues, More more >
  Topics: Music Features , Music, Arts, Amon Tobin,  More more >
| More


Most Popular
ARTICLES BY REYAN ALI
Share this entry with Delicious
  •   MARNIE STERN | THE CHRONICLES OF MARNIA  |  March 13, 2013
    In the arena of charming and entertaining indie-music figures, Marnie Stern stands unopposed.
  •   NO REST FOR BLACKBIRD BLACKBIRD  |  March 13, 2013
    Blackbird Blackbird's 2012 EP Boracay Planet takes its name from two sources: Boracay — a beach-filled, postcard-perfect island in the Philippines — and a dream Mikey Maramag had about the tourist trap, despite never having visited.
  •   WILD BELLE PUSH MAGICAL BUTTONS  |  February 11, 2013
    Wild Belle's multi-ethnic allegiances — Afropop, reggae, and rocksteady — fuse into American indie-pop and classic rock. Results are, at varying times, tropical, tepid, and tempestuous.
  •   THE LUMINEERS AIM FOR THE RAFTERS  |  February 01, 2013
    Jeremiah Fraites isn't famous — at least not yet. The drummer of the Lumineers, the folk trio who experienced an outrageously fruitful 2012, is talking to me two days before appearing on the January 19 Saturday Night Live, but he doesn't sound convinced that his band have crossed the fame threshold.
  •   PHANTOM GLUE COME INTO FOCUS  |  January 23, 2013
    Variations of "nightmarish" and "psychedelic" come up repeatedly as Matt Oates describes his band's work — which makes sense, given that Phantom Glue trace their roots back to Slayer, the Jesus Lizard, and cult post-hardcore act KARP.

 See all articles by: REYAN ALI