With Foley Room, Montreal's Amon Tobin throws his torch in with the blazing tradition of full-length works composed in the majority with found sounds. Having formerly made his name as a craftsman of vinyl samples into towering rhythmic dynamos like his fin-de-siecle LP, Supermodified, Tobin tries sampling the world for himself. With microphone in hand and his tape console slung over his shoulder, he captures the timbre of factories, a massive satellite dish, and local avant-garde improvisers with equal zest. One loping highlight comes early in "Big Furry Head," when during a token trip-hop lead-in--all reverb, squiggle, and over-compressed drumbeat--a tiger's hungry growls tears new life across the frequency spectrum, signaling the abyss-deep thump of Tobin's next new groove. Whether he's wandering through lush, meandering string workouts ("Bloodstone") or more aggressive avenues toward beauty ("Ever Falling"), Tobin's gait is ever informed by the beat. But where some contemporary found-sound sculptures like Matthew Herbert's Plat du Jour keep a more strident sampling ethos in the service of musical politics, Tobin's approach clearly reeks with a love of sound manipulation as its own reward: every process an adventure, each completed work a revelation. --Jason Kirk
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Foley Room is the sixth studio album by Brazilian drum and bass artist Amon Tobin. It was released on March 5, 2007 by Ninja Tune.
In the past, Tobin had created music through the sampling of old vinyl records. However, Foley Room is a marked departure from his traditional technique. Inspired by the foley rooms where sound effects are recorded for films, Tobin decided to record and work with original samples for the record. According to the Ninja Tune website, "Amon and a team of assistants headed out into the streets with high sensitivity microphones and recorded found sounds from tigers roaring to cats eating rats, neighbors singing in the bath to ants eating grass".[1] Tobin also called upon The Kronos Quartet, Stefan Schneider, and Sarah Page to record samples for the record. [2]
“ There's nothing new about field recordings of course. It's obviously been the traditional source material in sampling since the early days, so I'm really going "back to school" on this one. On the other hand, I always saw a divide between music that was based purely on sound design and tunes that were written to physically move people. A challenge for me has been to try and make 'tunes' using aspects of sound design normally associated with highbrow academic studies in this area. I don't know how successful I've been but that was a goal anyway. ”
Review :
Hey kids what about a little christmas gift? It's Sunday, December 24th and on this freezy xmas eve I got the chance to listen to the new Amon Tobin album... I must admit I really don't endorse the whole xmas shebang but here I am, taking this listening session as a nothing less thand a supa-cool gift.
Hum... Amon Tobin, supa-cool?? Ain't that the thing you'd rather put along with some Will Smith character or some Bart Simpson joke? Hell yeah. But what the heck - the best christmas movie ever is in my eyes Tim Burton's "The Nightmare Before Christmas", and I'm an Amon-addict ever since the second album, so this "Foley Room" one is just the perfect thing for today.
Ever heard of a foley room? It's s the place where the sound effects are recorded for films. I can already hear you thinking: "so after the 'Splinter Cell' soundtrack Amon Tobin has finally found his niche is horror movies and videogames scores?". Thankfully you'd be totally wrong. This title only implies that the artist has widened up the scope of his sound, recording lotsa real-life sounds and sound effects from all over the world with high-sensivity mikes.
So has he gone all minimal like a big part of the German scene? Nope. No house or techno stuff here, we stay in pure Amon Tobin soundscapes and structures. If a comparison had to be made, I'd say for example that if sound-manipulator Herbert is 10% genius and 90% rock'n'roll, then Amon Tobin prefers to stay focused on the first 10%.
Take the first single, "Bloodstone", which opens the album with guests The Kronos Quartet. It feels like their tuning session is what Amon recorded, deconstructed an reconstructed in an De Vinci kind of perfectionism! The "Big Furry Head" track is another god example, with its roaring lions, melancolic strings, industrial textures and jungle sounds, all perfectly fitting together as an obvious thing you could never have thought of.
Overall, the album sounds even more an otherwordly mashing-up of styles than before, with musique-concrete and drum'n'bass clashing over psychedelic effects, cinematic chords, rock riffs, hip hop and jungle beats, angelic backgrounds... the list goes on and on, but don't think for one second you'll get lost in a maze of music. This is forward-thinking at his best, with Amon Tobin pushing the boundaries of his art in uncharted territories, for his best and most consistent album yet... again!
Djouls
Links :
amontobin.com
ninjatune.net/ninja/artist.php?id=1
myspace.com/tobinamon
timec.net/ninjatune/index.php/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 resume-- 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 concrete 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
Review by John Bush
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.
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