Such indulgence could have been risky, but fortunately for Ninja, their trust was rewarded with a run of increasingly accomplished albums, ‘Permutation’ (1998), ‘Supermodified’ (2000), ‘Out From Outwhere’ (2002) and ‘Foley Room’ (2007), each exploring varying tempos and styles while furthering Amon’s movement away from traditional methods of making music. “There was a time when, if you used a sample, it was important that people recognized where things came from, so that they could see what was happening to it,” he says. “But after a certain point, when you change a sound so much and the grains get so small, it’s sort of irrelevant, so I realized at that point I didn’t need to be using samples, I could take sounds from anywhere.”
NATURAL WORLD
While on ‘Foley Room’ this involved breaking an instrument down into its component parts, realizing a snare drum is “a resonant chamber, it’s a piece of skin, it’s a spring”, and trying to recreate this through field recordings — one stunt involving Amon carrying a buzzing bees’ nest trapped under a glass bowl to the studio to sample for the sound of a surf guitar on ‘Esther’s’ — by ‘Isam’ he was breaking down sounds to create new instruments. “Basically any sound is made up of a series of sines, partials, which are sine waves that make up the different frequencies of the sound,” he says, getting into the science part and returning to the ever-chipped-at rock face of his curiosity. “Those can be synthesized with sums of sine waves. So you analyze the sound wave into a synthesized version of it, and suddenly you have a lot more flexibility.” If you’re as confused as we are, then the layman’s explanation is revealed on a YouTube video accompanying the release of ‘Isam’, where the sound of clinking bulbs, a spring and a creaking chair are combined via a piece of software most often used in film sound design to forge an idiosyncratic cyborg instrument, its creaking, rolling slurp, part-organic, part-mechanical.
Though his home now falls into the mould of ‘house in the woods’, surrounded by trees and only reachable by car, with a single shop serving him and his neighbors, Amon says this connection to nature has nothing to do with being a country person or “tree hugger”. “Even if you want to draw a realistic picture of a jar, you have to look at how light works and how perspective works. Then you become much more aware of natural
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phenomena and how that works as you’re analyzing it to make your replica of it. “I find it really interesting how there are certain patterns in nature. When you synthesise something, you have to study what it is that you’re trying to replicate. At that point, you start to see all these patterns, like with harmonics, there is a scale and there is a pattern. They’re universal and you can see it in the leaves of the trees.” Again, this could suggest some of the hippie philosophies of San Francisco have floated across on the city’s famous microclimate, but Amon hasn’t let his artistic independence or purity of vision stop him from courting commercial work, licensing tracks to the remake of The Italian Job, breaking into film soundtracks and being one of the first to work with computer designers, such as on his 2005 album ‘Chaos Theory — The Soundtrack To Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell’. “People get things a bit twisted and think commercial appeal somehow detracts from artistic integrity. I don’t think that’s true,” he says with a well-worn reply. “Money, for example, isn’t what restricts art. Traditionally, money is what supports art. The only thing I think that constricts artistic integrity is compromise, so if you’re compromising what you do – if I make a shit track because I want it to work in this Coca-Cola commercial — then I’ve got some issues.”
CINEMATIC
Unfortunately, for someone who once stated that his wish was “to make a full soundtrack for a really good film”, Hollywood has proved an area where money exerts a bigger pull than artistic reputation. “It’s not even a moral thing, I’m just shit at it,” he replies on handling the inevitable requests for changes that accompany big budgets. “So I’ve worked on films where the director and me have had direct contact, we both understand what we need to do and it’s a small production and they take a lot more risks.”
In its place, ‘Isam’ is his great debut as an auteur instead, Amon providing the soundtrack, orchestrating its visual aspect and taking the starring role as the space-suited controller who sporadically appears at the centre of the action. “It is a completely immature teenage fantasy story,” laughs the guy who lives down the road from George Lucas’ Luke Skywalker Ranch and often pops down to watch films, “but I am basically a nerd, so I feel completely justified doing that.” Still, it almost never happened. Not wanting to tour ‘Isam’ as a DJ, which Amon had done for previous
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albums, he was encouraged by Ninja to explore other avenues, and having seen primitive versions of video-mapping, set out to create something more narrative with the help of architect Heather Shaw and LA-based company V Squared. Now in its second phase, it’s impossible to do justice to the strobing, shifting kaleidoscope of imagery that compliments the fluidity of the album when we catch the show in the stone nobility of Berkeley’s Greek Theater. Now boosted by features including an array of animatronics, such as arms built from bicycle chains, the cubes on stage literally seem to melt and explode, morphing into different textures and environments. “The whole set is really heady, so it’s good to have release at the end of the night,” recognizes Tobin after testing the first phase, which brings us back to Two Fingers. “What I’ve been doing when the main part of the show ends is coming back to do a half-hour set. It’s me just rocking out some Two Fingers stuff as a thanks to everyone at the end of the night.”
TWO FINGERS
Indeed, it’s an explosive climax that starts the dance in earnest, as tracks like ‘Defender Rhythm’ switch between drum & bass and abrasive half-step, highlighting the smoking, skull-marked, industrial strength of the album’s first disc. Packed with three-minute bangers, ‘Magoo’ and ‘101 South’ render jiggy hip-hop as produced by Noisia, ‘Lock86’ sounds like Drexciya if they’d grown up as Hackney free-party tech-step heads, and ‘Little Brat’ could almost be Skrillex if he’d had an education from the European underground. It’s a departure from Two Fingers’ previous releases, which grew out of a “love affair with Timbaland and The Neptunes” and Amon shared with friend Joe Chapman, absent from the controls this time around. “It’s just the one finger at the moment. Joe is hopefully going to come back and do more stuff if I make more Two Fingers records. He’s really talented, so I hope so.” The second disc is equally cranked, but introduces US MCs Peedi Crakk, Chinko da Great, Lady Pharroh and Brefontaine to the process, Two Fingers having previously worked with UK rapper Sway, testing Amon’s cut ‘n’ paste entrenchment, but adding another dimension to the ride. “Joe and I would always have this battle. He’s really into hip-hop and MCs, and I’m just into the sound. I’d always approach the vocal as, I don’t even care what they’re saying, I just want it to work phonetically or rhythmically with the beat. They can say the same word over and over again for all I care.”
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