Amon Tobin: The Foley Room

CML call number: CD JAZZ Tobin
Sean Cooper wrote in Wired: "Like every good DJ, Amon Tobin tends to make new music by plundering vintage vinyl for cool snippets. But for his sixth album, the Brazilian beat junkie decided to take sampling to another level. He's turned everyday noises — a hive of wasps, a shimmying Slinky, a whirling eggbeater — into richly textured trip hop. To make The Foley Room, Tobin camped out in a studio typically used by sound engineers to record door slams and footsteps for movies. 'A Foley room is acoustically dead,' Tobin says. 'It makes everything raw with no spatial coloration, which means you can make the sound do whatever you want.' To find some of his 'performers,' Tobin ventured out with an omnidirectional mic, capturing everything from someone singing in the shower to a lion devouring a piece of meat. With roughly half a terabyte of material, he then used a technique called convolution reverb to stretch his from-scratch samples into full-fledged songs. The roar of a Harley got warped into a pounding bass line. That hive of wasps — total divas — became a humming groove" ("Play: Music: Amon Tobin Bugs Out," 4/07, p. 96).