PRETTY LIGHTS

ISAM, the latest effort by Brazilian-born electronic mastermind, Amon Tobin, begins with the static-speckled mutated warps of a spacecraft’s tractor beam pressed into vinyl and played in reverse.  As they whiz past -one by one- like radioactive mach 5 boomerangs, there’s a restrained compression to the short, quickly intensified spurts and it’s like being in a wind tunnel full of fluttering moths, while having close calls with a mob of light-cycles.  That is, of course, if there was a halogen model (it retains that ominous hum of fire-prone lighting fixtures).  While pockets of oxygen continue to get sucked out through the mouth of a vacuous wormhole, a slight framework of tones chime in all around, providing a new airy dimension to the aural environment.  These muted bells are sprinkled in or bong at various depths, illuminating like a smattering of fire flies.  They resonate briefly and disappear as quickly as they arrive.  Like dying stars, by the time you grasp the image of each little blooming glow, it’s already gone; evaporated and cloaked by the murk of dark matter.  The rattle of loosely tightened machine bolts is introduced and glitches sporadically.  The aquatic blurble of a submerging bathysphere slips in.  Intermittent bursts geyser up to temporarily spray-paint a fiber-optic aurora borealis in as a back drop.  At this point, we’re still only a little more than a minute into “Journeyman“, the lead off track from the new full-length.  The rest of the track continues to unravel slowly with bubbling crudes, shuffling mechanical insect legs, drops in atmospheric pressure, sizzling magma, and cannon blasts from pneumatic tubing.  It’s a fucking trip and the imagery that it summons is as vivid as it is abstract.  Toppling -choloroformed face first- through a looking glass, sucked through a folding tesseract, and spit into a dusky majestic forest that extends to the edges of the asteroid that it’s floating on.  There’s a segue into this world, but it’s so effective that you find yourself fully engulfed by it before you know what’s happened.  The most cliche, yet effective, comparison would be to the peaking of an LSD trip.  Tobin slowly draws you out of your skin to the point where you can almost feel that familiar tightening of your cheek bones, while your chest and head fill with helium.  Then you’re off; half zipping like Akira through a cybernetic metropolis and half floating motionless in the thick ooze of a sensory deprivation tank.  It’s a difficult task trying to describe the audio collages that Tobin constructs without the use of analogy and emotional references.  This is mainly because there are not “real” instruments on this album at all and the familiarity is much more emotional than logical.   Crafting new sounds, stacking them, weaving them together, painting the equivalent of a Roger Dean YES album gatefold with nothing but audio… It’s definitely an ambitious project.  And, as if the music wasn’t enough, Tobin‘s found a way to match it with an equally ambitious presentation; including an art exhibit and the first real “live show” that he’s ever attempted to put together. Read the rest of this entry →