Amon Tobin’s ISAM transforms into a universe

Amon Tobin’s live performance of his latest album, ISAM, debuted at MUTEK in the spring and has been blowing away audiences in Europe and North America ever since.

It’s an overwhelmingly audacious show – in fact, it proved challenging to even find venues that could accommodate such a physically massive set. For the performance, visuals are image-mapped onto a construction of larger-than-life cubist blocks. The images shift from videogame noir through minimalism to maximalist explosions of colour and movement amplified by the sounds they’re created to illustrate. The visuals play with your perception and tricking your senses so that the massive set seems to change shape or simply dissolve into smoke, moving and transforming before your eyes. Alternatively hidden and revealed inside a block in the center of the construction, Tobin is like a homunculus piloting a giant transformer as it hurtles through sound and space.

Such an ambitious project could easily have turned into Spinal Tap meets Tron but Tobin and his collaborators at V Squared Labs, Blasthaus, Vita Motus Design and Leviathan have filled their massive ambitions and nimbly avoided both pretention and cheese. Tobin’s signature darkly orchestral, sonically complex, bass heavy music and the visuals, which morph from abstraction to representation and back again, are so perfectly aesthetically matched and fluid that ISAM breaks both sound and visual barriers, melting into a singular sensory experience. Despite this, Tobin says that he didn’t create the album with visuals in mind or think about performing it until after it was completed.

Lift Off
“The music came first and I worked on it like any other album,” explains Tobin, who spent two years in the studio recording and playing with sounds he extracted from everyday objects – two light bulbs rubbed together, a squeaky old leather office chair as it swivels – that he transformed and used to compose post-industrial symphonies rich with delicate sonic textures and crunching power. Both the album and ISAM as an audiovisual performance synthesize the organic and the technological in a way that is simultaneously sublime and terrifying, familiar and alien…somehow ancient yet futuristic.

“The truth is, I’m always experimenting and trying to find things that excite me,” says Tobin, who is also loath to bore others. Modest by nature, Tobin has always found performing or touring to promote what has been created in the solitude of the studio a challenge. More than that, he thinks people deserve better than just watching him push some buttons or spin some records, they deserve to be properly entertained.

Where many performers use visuals to make themselves seem larger than life on the stage, Tobin chose to remain hidden in the heart of his massive set that quickly morphs into a transformer-like spaceship off to explore other dimensions. ISAM has no rock star taking center stage, you don’t just watch or listen to it, you’re right in the thick of it both visually and sonically.

ISAM’s really about creating an experience for the audience, a “proper show”, while giving the soft-spoken Tobin somewhere to hide while he rocks your world by immersing you in his.

Amon Tobin’s ISAM
October 24^th | Metropolis
59, Ste. Catherine E.
amontobin.com