Dr Dre Behind The Music

Amon Tobin is a master of metamorphosis.

On ISAM, his eighth and latest album (released today via indie British characterization Ninja Tune), he'southward evolved once once again. This time he'south congenital a virtual orchestra of out digitally rendered instruments, near all of them more or less synthesized from found objects. "I'm trying to make sounds that don't be in the real world, using things in the real world," Tobin says. "On this album, the sound isn't what it seems. At that place's no real guitar, real drum, or real voice. They've all been built to audio like instruments–only I tin can get them to do impossible things."

The 39-twelvemonth-old Brazilian electronic composer began his career in the mid-'90s as a DJ/producer renowned for his drum-n-bass beats and has since evolved into a pioneer in experimental music and become a sought-afterwards sound designer behind ii of the gaming world's near cinematic and gritty soundtracks–Splinter Cell and Infamous. His signature style is in his ability to morph sounds, like he did on 2007's Foley Room, extracting samples from field recordings (a roaring motorcycle, an pismire eating grass) and intermission them down by their "spectral components"–that is, analyzing the physics of each sound: What are its physical parameters? How does it reverberate? Tobin fifty-fifty takes apart his own pipes on ISAM, messing with recordings of his singing voice until it takes on the eerie soprano of a immature daughter.

Meanwhile, dorsum in real life Tobin has collaborated with British creative person Tessa Farmer, who created original visual work inspired by ISAM. Farmer also manipulates and re-purposes unexpected materials, simply here, she'south made miniature sculptures out of insect carcasses, turning dead bugs into exquisitely chilling fairies. Tobin and Farmer "accept a complete synergy with their work," explains Ninja Tune's Maddy Save, who introduced the duo to each other. "They both get together and collate materials from their called environments and translate the commonplace into complex systems. They suspension things down, strip away familiar layers, and reorder or transform them to create hybrids that pb the imagination into other unsettling and disorientating worlds." A express edition CD package includes a total-color hardbound book of Farmer'due south sculpture along with sectional interviews with both artists on the projection. Farmer'south series will also be on display at the Crypt Gallery in London, showtime May 26, with ISAM as the companion soundtrack.

This summertime, Tobin will also introduce something spectacular into ISAM: actual spectacle, in the form of an eye-popping interpretation of his work. "I didn't want to be the guy onstage hunched over my laptop," Tobin says. Enter director Vello Virkhaus, cofounder of the Los Angeles-based V Squared Labs, the high-tech visual arts and F/X company behind the lavish stage designs for 50 Cent, the Police force, and Coldplay. For ISAM, "Amon had this idea of making information technology a space journey," Virkhaus says. "So we decided to build him this structure, where he would airplane pilot information technology similar a space craft, and project images onto the structure to create this illusion of take off, then explore a dynamic universe."

To do this, Virkhaus and his team, along with large-scale visual design company Leviathan in Chicago and SF-based fine art-techies Blasthaus, built a massive, 2.five-ton structure composed of dozens of white cubes and rectangles fabricated of wood and steel. Ii sides of each box face the audiences at 45 degrees and then the images hit both sides for a richer three-D effect.

In the middle of the structure is Tobin's cockpit–a semi-transparent command room where he plays his laptop and tweaks a few visual components to lend a sense of spontaneity.

The structure, at outset glance, looks like a giant game of Tetris. But with the images, which were rendered, mapped, and calibrated past Virhaus and his team using custom-built 3-D modeling software, LED mapping programs and videogame blitheness techniques, the piece transforms into a shape-shifting, all-enveloping feel with glowing stars, orange volcanos, and a blasting rocket ship. The final outcome is like an exhibit you'd expect to detect in the netherworld between MOMA and ILM. And, according to Ninja Melody'south Jeff Waye, the whole set is and then original, it may not get a echo performance after it's run, which begins June 1 at Montreal's MUTEK festival before heading to Europe for a string of dates. (A U.Due south. tour is expected early fall.) "We're thinking of burning the whole thing down when the tour ends–including Tobin," he says. "He tin can't possibly top this one."

(Really, he lives in a trivial cubby in the middle of it)