Random Sampling Errors
Wayward results on Amon’s musical adventure
DJING “As a DJ, Ninja sent me out on a baptism of fire tour with the Herbaliser. I had to open for them and I was playing Danny Breaks and all this really gnarly drum and bass on Penny Black and clearing the dancefloor every fucking night. I was also playing really badly because the first time I went on, I didn’t know what a mixer was, I didn’t know how turntables worked! So I had the fader over on the right and that track was going to end soon and I was wondering how I got the other track to play. It sounds really obvious now but at the time I didn’t know what a crossfader was! I got shit thrown at me and people would leave.”
Watching America’s current obsession with ever-heavier sounds from afar, ‘Stunt Rhythms’ could be exactly the album to follow the interest generated by Amon’s live show, palatable to the brostep crew who at one dubstep-dominated festival sat down baffled when confronted by ‘Isam’ in its previous incarnation. But if this is the case, then the timing is purely down to Amon’s own inner compass, rather than any commercial calculation. “I feel so strongly against that,” he says on the tendency of artists to come to see themselves as entertainers. “That is the definition of selling out for me. It’s trying to pander to your fan base. What are the odds that you can read these people’s
minds and really know? From my first album there’s been an equal amount of love and hate.
“I’m not raging against the machine or anything,” he continues, “it’s motivational. The first pieces of music I sent out that I mentioned earlier, I was thinking, ‘How can I make a living out of music, how can I make this appeal to people?’ And I made the most awful shit, it was just terrible, so I wasn’t satisfying anyone. “Maybe there are people more skilled at that, who can read the general consensus a bit more intuitively. I’m just not one of those people. The next record will probably be a continuation, so we’ll see where that goes, really.”
DRUM AND BASS “Playing out for the first ten years, I was really into drum and bass and went to Music House to get my dubplates cut there. It was a pain in the arse because I’d have to wait all day and sit there while the big names, you know Hype and Grooverider, came in first and got their dubplates cut. Everyone can hear what you’re cutting as well and I’d get some weird fucking Disney influenced drum and bass fantasy record. They’re all sitting around in their puffa jackets thinking who is this fucking freak? [Laughs] But you know, it was fine!”
THEREMIN ORCHESTRAS “I did a show at the Disney Concert Hall in LA and they had a Theremin orchestra playing before. I had no idea how highly strung these people are. You’ve got no frets, so it’s all approximate. It was the first time they’d formed an orchestra, they were from all over the world, and it was just a cacophony of almost notes. They’re all looking at each other like, ‘You didn’t get that right!’ [Laughs] Definitely a solo instrument. It’s a great building. We’d put surround speakers in and it sounded terrible because it’s made for acoustic, not amplified music. I was doing a bunch of shows like that but learnt the hard way that it doesn’t really translate. It’s good for singers and cello players but electronic music and Theremins suck.”
PIANO “I’ve tried to learn instruments. To this day I know the blues scale on the piano and that’s it! It’s great because I can sit down and tinkle for five minutes and look really cool but any longer than that and you realize that I’m just doing the same thing over and over. I can’t play two different things with two different hands. When I moved to Portugal I was looking for jobs, so I went into all these different cafes and restaurants saying ‘Yeah, I can do this’. People would just be sitting there looking over going, ‘Doesn’t he know anything else?”
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