Amon Tobin’s ISAM Merges Music, Meat, Machines in 3-D Show, Creepy Hardcover
- By Scott Thill
- June 6, 2011 |
- 7:00 am |
- Categories: music
Amon Tobin is blinded by the multimedia light in his latest effort ISAM and its stunning live show. Image courtesy Nathan Seabrook.
Electronic musician Amon Tobin launches a formidable one-two punch with his new full-length, ISAM, and a visually ambitious tour that pairs the record’s sonically challenging music with shape-shifting 3-D animation.
“The idea was to integrate myself, quite literally, into an audio and visual presentation of the album,” the Brazilian-born Tobin told Wired.com in an e-mail interview.
As previewed in the gallery above and the in-depth video below, the live show will find Tobin performing from within an arty geometric hive. Ensconced within the 25-foot by 14-foot by 8-foot central cube, Tobin will use real-time projection mapping, generative imagery and audio-reactive elements to produce a brain-teasing electronic music performance with little in the way of precedent.
“The show isn’t about being a big flashy production,” said Tobin of the visual component, which was created by V Squared Labs and Leviathan. “It’s not giant walls of LEDs constantly flashing meaningless visual content at you until you puke. It’s completely unique and actually quite bizarre.”
Just as bizarre is Control Over Nature, a collaboration between Tobin and artist Tessa Farmer on exhibit at London’s Crypt Gallery through Sunday. (The exhibit crosses the pond in the fall.)
Control Over Nature matches ISAM’s lush, inorganic soundscapes with Farmer’s sculptures of flies, microbot fairies and decomposing natural life. Photographed by Pelle Crepin, the images in Control Over Nature will be featured in limited-edition packaging for ISAM. (For a look at the imagery, see the gallery above. For a taste of the music, check out “Lost & Found,” at left, or Wired.com’s exclusive download of Two Fingers’ remix of ISAM’s “Surge,” below.)
Tobin’s tour started Wednesday in Montreal, extends through Europe throughout the summer, and reaches U.S. shores this fall. We pick Tobin’s brain on digitalism’s divide, DJ culture, scoring film and more in the interview below.
Wired.com: ISAM’s live show looks like a mindfuck of the highest order.
Amon Tobin: The performance of electronic music isn’t very interesting to look at, because it’s generally not performance-based music. So outside of the realm of making people dance, which isn’t really what this record is about, a live show presents something of a challenge.
Wired.com: How did you surmount that challenge?
Tobin: Fortunately the people at V Squared, from the set designers to visual artists and technicians, are very talented and hard-working people. Every single track has its own visual theme and audio-reactive components. They put as much care and detail into the visual content as I did into the music.
Wired.com: How do you think Tessa Farmer’s microfairies flesh out (so to speak) ISAM’s concept?
Tobin: It made perfect sense, because we are both taking natural elements and rearranging them into imagined unnatural environments. Tessa took each track on the album and made a piece for it. At first, I thought we might just be using them for the artwork. But they were so amazing that it turned into a full-on art exhibition. I feel very lucky to have the involvement of such a serious talent on the album. I can’t believe my music is in an art gallery either. The whole thing’s crazy to me!
Wired.com: Your 40th birthday is next year, and your debut effort Adventures in Foam turns 15 this September. What have you learned about the evolution of technology and electronic music in that time?
Tobin: One thing I’ve noticed, as I gradually and happily turn into a grumpy old man, is that evolution of technology and technology-driven music isn’t always in sync. I think this is because, in the end, creativity doesn’t really need technology. It’s very much the other way around.
Wired.com: Technology can turn into a crutch too quickly?
Tobin: It makes me think of those funny televisions adverts from the ’50s, advocating push-button solutions to pretty much everything that might involve you getting up off your fat arse. Technology is sold as a sort of automated alternative to human effort, instead of a tool for actual progress.
Wired.com: How do you mean?
Tobin: In the same way now, music technology is marketed primarily as a way to make things easier, from DJing to production. Which is a sleight of hand I think, by those who are trying to sell it. The notion that you can buy what you might lack through personal effort and ingenuity is very appealing to us all, given that we are inherently lazy. And naturally, this is capitalized upon.
Wired.com: So what’s the silver lining?
Tobin: Thankfully, the flip side of all this is there is so much evidence of people using the tools available as a starting point, rather than an end in itself. So here’s to the abuse of technology. Long live the kids doing it. Now get out of my yard!
Wired.com: Your earlier work was sample-based hip-hop mashed into something new and extraordinary. Your later work, especially Foley Room, has become more experimental, using field recordings and other found sounds in unusual ways. Do you think, at this point in electronic music, it’s practically mandatory that DJs dramatically reach beyond their source materials to the point that they’re unrecognizable?
Tobin: I don’t think anything in music is mandatory. But I would say that your creative input is determined by what you do with your materials, samples or otherwise, and not by the materials themselves. With that in mind, it makes sense that someone needs to shape their source material into whatever they imagine by altering it. After all, that’s what any artist does in any medium.
If you are specifically talking about traditional sampling, such as lifting slices from dusty vinyl, there is something else to take into account. Because this kind of sampling is about creating a new context for existing material. It’s about changing a sample’s meaning by placing it in a new musical environment, which is often at odds with the source material. For this to work, the sample actually needs to be recognizable in order to appreciate its new placement and use. But none of the above is at all relevant to ISAM, given there aren’t any samples on it.
Wired.com: Your music has appeared in commercials, and you’ve even scored videogames and films about body horror and space weaponization. Any other film-scoring gigs coming up that we should know about?
Tobin: I go back and forth with the whole film-scoring thing. I love the idea of it, but every time I get close it starts to look like too many people involved. Perhaps there’s too much money at stake for the music, and even the film itself, to end up as intended from the start.
Wired.com: Do you have any wish-list directors you’d like to work with?
Tobin: I’d really love to directly collaborate with a director again, like I did with [Gy�rgy P�lfi's] Taxidermia. But that might have to stay in the realm of small productions, which is fine with me. Having said that, Martin Scorsese’s production assistant recently asked me for a copy of Taxidermia’s score, which really took me by surprise! So who knows?
Scott Thill covers pop, culture, tech, politics, econ, the environment and more for Wired, AlterNet, Filter, Huffington Post and others. You can sample his collected spiels at his site, Morphizm.Follow @morphizm on Twitter.
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