Amon Tobin

The twitchiest, most forward-thinking artist on the Ninja Tune label—and that's saying something—Amon Tobin comes out of the same mid-'90s glitchcore scene as Squarepusher and Aphex Twin. Lately, however, he's been leaving his peers in the dust. Foley Room might be his most thrilling, mind-bending work to date, a bold extension of the dense, cinematic style he perfected on 2002's Out From Out Where. Made up mostly of found sounds and snippets of old movie soundtracks, the album is creepy as hell, but shot through with tinges of beauty, grandeur, and melancholy—like the ruins of a bombed-out cathedral in some sci-fi, H.R. Geiger fantasy.

Describing the music on Foley Room is like catching a tidal wave in a Dixie cup, as new sounds emerge with each listen. Harps and string quartets brush up against the sounds of creaky door hinges and riot batons dragged across prison cell bars; manic, drum-n-bass clatters of percussion fight it out with foggy-voiced church choirs; revving motorcycles morph into growling jungle cats and back again. It all builds to a stunning climax on "At the End of the Day," when Tobin finally breaks out one of his trademark, mutated string samples and resolves all that crazy noise into a single, stately chord. Right now, nobody else is making electronic music on a canvas this big.

- Andy Hermann
03.05.07

Perhaps tiring of the invisible soundtracks playing in his head, Amon Tobin delivered a video-game soundtrack Chaos Theory: Splinter Cell 3 in 2005 and then hit the streets and studios, with microphones in tow, to produce 2007's Foley Room, an exercise in "field" recording. ("Foley rooms" are, apparently, the sound-effects chambers used by those in film.) Of course, anyone expecting crickets and hollers will be on unfamiliar ground, but those who are already aware of Tobin's penchant for spacious productions and sounds previously unheard in nature will know exactly what to expect. His stated aim here was to bridge the divide "between music that was based purely on sound design and tunes that were written to physically move people." But that's nothing new for him -- since the beginning of his career, he's been one of the best producers at manipulating found sounds into more-or-less danceable songs. Helping him on his quest is a large cast of collaborators, including Kronos Quartet, harpist Sarah Page, and Stefan Schneider of Music A.M. and To Rococo Rot. The music is suitably impressive, and shows -- as it should -- a far wider range of moods and textures than Tobin's work in the past. With good reason, the most adventurous tracks here ("Horsefish" and "Big Furry Head") are also the best, showing Tobin stretching himself beyond the usual electronica brainmelt into more progressive territory. [A Ninja Tune edition with a bonus DVD includes about 20 minutes of footage showing Tobin and crew gathering their sounds.] ~ John Bush, All Music Guide