Amon Tobin Foley Room
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
