Amon Tobin, Foley Room
Ninja Tune, 2007
Whoopy-frickin-do! You downloaded a sample pack. Hardly sweated over getting that synth line though, mate… Spare a thought for Amon Tobin, in the back of a cab, on the way to the studio, to record a taped-up bowl of agitated wasps [“It was hot to the touch. They were furious!”]
This is Foley Room – an album with pissed off insects providing the sounds. As well as the growls of an intimately miked lion, the clunk-clicks of a CD pressing plant, and the whirring turns of a monstrous outdoor satellite dish, to name but a few more.
“I just wanted to treat all sounds as being musical, whether or not they came from an instrument,” says Tobin.
Armed with a “satchel-sized” Nagra tape machine, and the vastly more experienced engineer Vid Cousins and his Earthworks mics, they rampaged around, capturing an exotic library of sounds to help build this staggering album.
“The idea was to record it all onto 1/4” magnetic tape, and then manipulate it later in a really creative way,” says Tobin. “You can really get into tape.”
Indeed. He’d manually slow the machine down to pitch and distort noises until they became unrecognisable tones, full of rich character and new potential.
“You can play a lot with that stuff,” he says. “You can drag it along at the tapehead with your finger and make something completely different, or slow it down to an impossible degree without any sonic artifacts. Unlike digital, there was no aliasing.”
Back in the studio he assembled virtuoso musicians, directing them to improvise largely away from melody, weaving his found sounds into the mix.
“They were way over-qualified, by the way, to be doing what I was asking them to do,” says Tobin. “I’d be saying, ‘Oh can you, like, not musically… I don’t know, do this with a toothbrush? Or do it while hanging upside down… Or underwater.’ I wanted all the freedom to take the recordings in any direction I wanted, afterwards.”
Bonkers. If that’s not commitment to sound design, then we don’t know what is. Kinda makes your recent purchase of ‘Epic Big Room Lead Lines Vol.4’ seem a tad lame now, right?