Taken from his soon to be released album Foley Room, Brazilian experimental artist Amon Tobin's latest release features instrumentals constructed around found noises - from tigers roaring to the sound of ants eating - mixed with classical orchestration.
Rather than the found noises dictating the shape of the pieces, they are worked deftly into familiar structures, and used to replace more traditional instruments. The first track, Bloodstone, is a stuttering waltz on which the Kronos Quartet provide the crescendo of strings into which the tune spirals, having slowed and speeded up like a fairground organ. The result is the soundtrack to a film where a clown with a big knife hides behind the merry-go-round, waiting to get you.
Esthers, the second track, is much more upbeat, toying with the notion of surf music but replaces the bass with motorbikes tuning up, and augments the guitar with recordings of wasps, giving a sonic richness to a lightweight genre, and for the final piece (which isn't on the forthcoming album), Here Comes The Moon Man, Tobin's sense of playfulness once again gets to work, taking recordings from a scrap yard and weaving them into a chilled, gently repetitive theme. This is clever and rewarding music; breaking it down into its constituent parts can never do justice to it inventiveness.
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