Send "Amon Tobin " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Popmatters |
 Someone leaked ISAM on April 14. Who cares, right? Every album leaks, some way ahead of “schedule”, others close to the actual release date. Who cares if ISAM comes with a remarkably elaborate packaging and art book to supplant the music with appropriate and necessary visual stimuli? Who cares if there’s an ISAM installation from May 26 - June 5 in London to coincide with the album’s physical release? Who cares if Amon Tobin embarks on a groundbreaking live tour that also coincides with the album’s physical release? Who cares if Tobin and visual artist Terry Farmer worked on this project for years? And, of course, who cares if that leak was somewhere around 192 kbps?Ninja Tune was phased by the leak, but not crippled. They pushed up the digital release by over a month and gave Tobin’s audience what they wanted: a high quality download of the best electronic album of the year. Then Amon Tobin provided a track-by-track commentary of the album on Soundcloud. Ninja Tune lashed out at the anonymous critic who leaked the album, but responded in the best way possible: they forged on. Collective listening experiences are nearly impossible in the contemporary music landscape. Only one band can claim that right, and they proved their stature again last February with The King of Limbs. Enough side notes, however. Bells, whistles, confetti cannons and streamers only go so far. After the storm settles, the music matters most. In 2007, Amon Tobin released Foley Room, an album that consisted entirely of foley sound captured by Tobin and a team of assistants. The team recorded nearly everything they came across (from the typical conversation to more obscure sounds like ants eating grass (whatever that means)). Listening to the album is still a jarring experience. Tobin took hundreds of unrelated samples and smashed, wove, stapled, glued and nailed them together into an architecture of sound. It was an interesting project that took dedicated listening and a strong attention span, but it lacked the precision and clear-headed direction Amon Tobin was known for, almost as if he was a kid let loose in FAO Schwartz....full text |
| Beatsandbeyond |
| Many of you might still remember Amon from his days as a prodigious Jungle producer, but he has since long abandoned the limitations of the genre. With two more albums scheduled to drop this year, the first one to appear is ISAM, an album that combines his love for gritty field recordings, art, sci-fi and electronica into a stunning piece of intelligent sound design. ISAM is the result of recording and synthesizing countless snippets of sounds, after which they were built into actual instruments that were subsequently used to create its content. The result is an album that sounds unmistakably organic, intelligent and –in a way- beyond comprehension. Some would refer to this as IDM, but ISAM stretches far beyond this definition only....full text |
| Trebuchet-magazine |
| For many people growing up in the 90s Aphex Twin and Amon Tobin were respectively our Beatles and Stones. One noted for changing what music was about with a handful of releases, the other, starting from a more purist setting, created album after album, each more individual than the last and guiding people further and further onward into the possibilities of tonal expression. While, Aphex Twin’s output has diminished largely over the last ten years Amon Tobin’s seems to be getting increasingly exciting, experimental and vital. His latest offering Isam is not as instantly familiar as his breakbeat jazz based earlier work, nor as rhythmically accessible as either unalloyed Tour-de-force Foley Room or his Two Fingers releases. In fact, it’s probably one of the most self indulgent records you’re likely to hear this year. At worst some of the tracks on the release border on boring; anodyne tinkles and reworked field recordings, twisted bass rumbles border on arrhythmic, child toy samples and starkly distorted vocals reminiscent of The Orb, seem all in all to pass each other by without locking into a solid sense of momentum. There are moments on tracks like Wooden Toy and Kitty Cat where you’d be forgiven for thinking that you were listening to a Cafe Del Kiddie compilation track. What were my expectations? Did I expect more of the same from Amon Tobin? The same breaks orientated abstractions twisted further out? Sure I did, why wouldn’t I? Reading through some of the press it seems he’s attempting to create something new from post-processed field recordings. We’re told ‘This is NEW music’. We’re not supposed to listen to the album like we did the others, this one is something else. Isam supposes an appreciation of music concrete, dada-esque sound art and a willingness to throw expectations aside and enjoy it for what it is. The problem here is that I don’t want to. I don’t really want to listen to just anything, no matter how well it’s produced, I want to listen to something emotively interesting and satisfying. Isam refuses to cater to any of these considerations and for everything I don’t like about it, am consistently frustrated by, find ephemeral and borderline inane, I can’t stop listening to the damn thing....full text |
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