Amon Tobin

Amon Tobin
The Foley Room
[Ninja Tune; 2007]
Rating: 8.1

For someone with such an uncanny aptitude for evoking a wide range of cinema-friendly mood music, Amon Tobin's potential as a soundtracker seems to have been largely unrealized. What he does have on his resumé-- the scores to stealth-kill video game Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, a surrealist, morbid Hungarian film about taxidermy, and a car commercial in which a group of presumably nude silhouettes contort their way into the shape of an SUV-- hints at why. Since Tobin makes no distinctions between background and foreground music and tends to wring as much distortion, dissonance, and rhythmic unease as he can from his jazz and orchestral-skewing sample sources, his music tends to evoke a malevolent presence that, whether skulking or charging, easily overwhelms all but the most immersive and eye-catching visual accompaniment.

The irony in Tobin's The Foley Room is that his cinematic ear has spurred him toward different motion picture-derived source material. Paring down his repertoire of bop debris and Ennio Morricone/Jerry Goldsmith evocations, Tobin's assembled his newest album as if he's decided he's exhausted the possibilities of musical instruments themselves and gone outside with a microphone to find out what sort of ambient sounds would make good beats. It makes sense in that the only thing that separates the manipulated sound of a household appliance or the drone of machinery from an electronically generated percussive effect is the element of familiarity; given the way Tobin's samples tend to transmutate traditional orchestration into concussed unrecognizability, manipulating a non-musical effect into a similar state is an inevitable step, one that he initially took in 1998 with Permutation and has been creeping towards ever since.

But while other musique concrète specialists such as Matmos aim to bring specific messages to mind with their thematic choices of sound manipulation, Tobin's approach seems to aim strictly for the aesthetic-- like two slabs of raw steak smacked together to simulate a punch to the head in some 1930s radio serial, the meaning of the medium's less important than how the end result sounds. Some of the effects' usage is a bit self-aware of their non-musical origins: "Kitchen Sink" is just that, a booming series of splashes that sound like elastic liquid dripping into a stainless steel basin and ricocheting its way down the drain; the fuzztone in the metallic drill-n-bass of "Esther's" is boosted by the rumble of a motorcycle engine, "Leader of the Pack" style (a rumble augmented by, and this required looking up, the sound of restless wasps); the title track introduces a few clamorous mess-making tumbles and crashes, shaped into something that sounds like the collapse of a kitchen shelf set to an Art Blakey drum solo.

But not everything is as blatantly laid out: The Robitussin whir that "The Killer's Vanilla" breathes through could be anything from a slowed-down pipe organ to a creaking set of gears passed through a filter or three, not to mention the way "Keep Your Distance" blurs the lines between woodblock-and-cowbell percussion and what seems to be the clamor of a recycling bin tipping over. Since Tobin still uses his share of musical instrumentation (including a memorable Slavic-esque string melody contributed by the Kronos Quartet on "Bloodstone"), figuring where the musician ends and nature or the machinery or the junkpile begins is intriguingly confusing. Supposedly there are recordings of ants eating grass and building acoustics somewhere on this record, but damned if they're easy to pinpoint amidst the beats.

Once the novelty of the record's field recording collage-job settles down, The Foley Room proves to be rhythmically consistent with Tobin's glitchy, post-jungle M.O., if somewhat exploratory; a couple moments flirt with dubstep but get too twitchy and restless to segue all that comfortably into your typical Burial track, and the broken-down carnival dance-rock of "Always" is just close enough to a genuine crowd-pleasing dancefloor number that it's a bit startling when the inevitable diamond-crushing load of distorted bass comes in. In the end, what makes The Foley Room Tobin's best album in seven years is the way his bent for organized chaos manifests as a deft control of every sound that surrounds him: Anything's a beat, everything's a break, and the difference between sound and music is entirely contextual.

-Nate Patrin, March 05, 2007
- Pitchforkmedia.com

Wired Magazine 2007
Amon Tobin Bugs Out

Like every good DJ, Amon Tobin tends to make music by plundering vintage vinyl for cool snippets. But for his sixth album, the Brazilian beat junkie decided to take sampling to another level. He’s turned everyday noises – a hive of wasps, a shimmying Slinky, a whirling eggbeater – into richly textured trip hop. To make The Foley Room (sic), Tobin camped out in a studio typically used by sound engineers to record door slams and footsteps for movies. “A Foley room is acoustically dead,” Tobin says. “It makes everything raw with no spatial coloration, which means you can make the sound do whatever you want.” To find some of his “performers”, Tobin ventured out with an omnidirectional mic, capturing everything from someone singing in the shower to a lion devouring a piece of meat. With roughly half a terabyte of material, he then used a technique called convolution reverb to stretch his from-scratch samples into full-fledged songs. The roar of a Harley got warped into a pounding bass line. That hive of wasps – total divas – became a humming groove. “We had a lot of trouble with the insects,” Tobin says. “They wouldn’t stay in one spot.” Hey, at least he can say this new album’s go serious buzz.
– Sean Cooper.
- Wired

Amon Tobin
Foley Room
(Ninja Tune)
by Nate Dorr
8/10

Amon Tobin closed out the last millennium with a series of three definitive albums of dense, lush drum’n’bass. In 1997, Bricolage introduced the style, all fluidly jazz-informed percussion thrashing from within a sheen of reverb and hi-hats and steeped in bits of atmospheric film score. The next year, Tobin further developed his sound on Permutations, with a deeper use of melodic content and a more convincingly “live” drum programming style. Finally, 2000’s Supermodified completed the trifecta with a set of moody instrumental textures and clamorous breakbeats like extended jazz solos, all seamlessly integrated from now-unrecognizable vinyl sources. It’s not so much that all three records were flawless (indeed, at first I found it difficult to travel back from Permutations to Bricolage), but that each offered so strong a vision, such a natural progression from the album preceding it, such inarguable evidence of sheer technical prowess. After an ascent like that, any follow-up would seem disappointing. And they were—2002’s Out from Out Where, shed drum’n’bass for hip-hop inflections, feeling rather emptier for it, and 2005’s soundtrack for the game Splinter Cell III, though offering a few quintessential tracks, often revealed its nature as a backdrop for onscreen action. And as such, the widening release gap ached all the more sharply.

This could be the make-or-break point. A full five years since the last “official”, non-soundtrack album, the Brazilian sound-scientist has re-surfaced with Foley Room, an album boldly forgoing reliance on samples for an additional assortment of live instrumentation and field recordings. Such an album could have ended up overly academic and self-involved, more interested in sound-sourcing than creating the sort of visceral momentum that marked past albums. Or it could have simply drifted out into pure atmospherics and experiments in musique conrète, which could have been interesting, but perhaps disappointing given Tobin’s resume. Fortunately, Foley Room falls into neither of these traps, sounding, even 7 years later, like a smooth, natural progression from Supermodified.

Dubious of the utility of, say, field-recorded zoo lions, as anything more than garnish in a Tobin trip-hop track? Witness “Big Furry Head”, where plucked minor strings and a stark clatter of drums gain a deadly focus and tension from the incorporation of a crisp selection of snarls and rumbles. Rather than simply sitting atop the other elements, these sounds are nestled perfectly into the beat. The track is a single animal and you can practically hear the sinews coiling before the killing leap. Do you, likewise, expect sampled motorcycle engines to be nothing more than kitschy Easy Rider nostalgia? That’s because you’ve never heard one hammered and re-pitched into the shape of the grinding bassline in “Esther’s”, a track with so much raw horsepower (unfortunately not entirely harnessed by the lock-step drum break) that it makes me wonder what would happen if the old dnb standby of Hoover bass was supplanted by Harley bass. These are field recordings at their most viscerally involved, built into their tracks from the ground up.

Throughout Foley Room, melodies are just as well-integrated. Tobin’s past work is perhaps most striking for its ability to meld disparate parts in a completely convincing manner, regardless of source, and the addition of new sources in no way lessens this effect. While live musicians aren’t an entirely new inclusion (the Splinter Cell soundtrack actually involved the orchestrations of several), the addition receives a more proper unveiling here: opener “Bloodstone” is a collaboration with the Kronos Quartet, whose past work includes work with minimalist classical composers like Steve Reich, and Clint Mansel’s soundtrack for Requiem for a Dream. Here, the quartet’s scrapes and sweeps of melody weave thick textures around Tobin’s snatches of piano and verb-washed orchestration, even holding their own against the collapsing factory of percussive noise that eventually attempts to inundate them.

I could go on. “The Killer’s Vanilla” is a taut collection of overdriven organs that eventually allows the drums their long-awaited full velocity, while “Kitchen Sink” is just that, cobbling a near-unidentifiable array of objects into an odd cut and paste exercise that seems to be constantly throwing off bits of cutlery, sticks, and creaking doors—anything, apparently, but actual instruments. Closer “At the End of the Day”, with it’s own collection of strings, atmospherics, and intensely satisfying sprawl of percussion, serves as an effective mirror to the introductory majesty of “Bloodstone”. With the exception of a few more ambient numbers and the generally restrained tempos, which may frustrate fans of the first two albums hoping for a more stable drum’n’bass foundation, there’s little to complain about - Popmatters.com

#5 Amon Tobin Foley Room (Ninja Tune)

Cooks know that ingredients make all the difference. For his sixth album, Amon Tobin moved his kitchen to Montreal and went organic, enlisting such local luminaries as Stef Schneider (Luyas, Bell Orchestre) and Patrick Watson. With his magnificent ear for nuance and most breathtaking arrangements to date, Tobin’s work on Foley Room is more molecular gastronomy than the usual slice and dice, so finely executed and so carefully reassembled that few of the contributing musicians recognise their own playing.-- Helen Spitzer - Exclaim