With “ISAM” Amon started with field recordings but then synthesised the sounds and built them into actual playable instruments.
Gradually, though, the samples “got smaller and smaller and more processed until they became less about context or reference and more like a physical reincarnation of sounds.” This led to the next stage in Tobin’s development, his last album, “Foley Room,” where he followed a Cage-ian tack and “looked at all sounds as potentially musical,” ending up using his own field recordings of lions, wolves, bees, factories and so on. Tobin’s earliest work, in his own words, “took bits of existing music from old records and tried to find new contexts for them.” This led to albums like “Bricolage” and “Supermodified” (the clues being in the titles). Re-drawing and blurring the lines between psychedelia and sci-fi, between art and entertainment, between sound design and melody, Amon Tobin has created the finest, most intense work of his very considerable career, an extension and refinement of everything he has achieved thus far, a crowning achievement in the process that he describes as “re-ordering the things around me.” What is “ISAM”? A transmission from a distant planet? A gateway into an alternate reality? A codename for a new psychotropic? A freshly discovered planet? A secret swinger’s network? A liberation theology? A soundtrack to the ultimate snuff movie? Nonsense? The only sense in town?
0 kommentar(er)
