ISAM is the culmination of a trilogy by Amon Tobin in the past decade and his take on the purest form of electronic: Concrete Music, the fundamental pillar of electronic music.

Pierre Schaeffer, French radio engineer of the 1940s, created the first electronic music studio in Paris and began experimenting with what he called “musique concrete”. For Schaeffer music is a living form. So he pioneers a system, in which he was able to electronically change the pitch, duration and amplitude of field recordings (barking dog) and no-canonic instruments (washer machine). He try to find common properties between sounds and create new “noise”.

If you need to kill the curiosity, The Iowa City Public Library has a magnificent 3CD boxset (OHM : the early gurus of electronic music, 1948-1980) all about the roots of electronica and the importance of Concrete Music.

After mastering Drum&Bass , The curiosity about concrete music and sound design change his interest, and Amon Tobin started looking for new forms, leaning towards the left-field of electronica. As a result, for the past decade he have released two full album (2007) Foley Room and (2009) Two Fingers (collaboration with Doubleclick) about his experiments with the Concrete philosophy.

On his newest work, ISAM, Amon Tobin pushes further by using another pillar of electronic music, synthesizer music instead of the organic sounds of the two previous albums to sculpt into new ones, literally. The vocals are Amon Tobin’s for the first time, synthesized and gender modified. In a quote at its record label, Ninja Tunes  ”It’s by far the most exciting development in my personal quest for some control over nature” Tobin explains “Anything from a grain of found sound to my own voice can be transformed into something new.”

ISAM is about control and patience, the submission of the sound, of the chaos. Amon tries to show the process of control, what takes to tame the sounds. I personally impress of how well he express this “abstract” by using syncopated rhythms, silence hat and snares that creates off beats, there isn’t always a bassline, but the created-sounds have these features of bass. Impress because ISAM is probably the most melodic of the trilogy. In the middle of this anarchy of sounds, melodies are used as whips to tame, they come quick and the drop fast. He’s more of a sound scientist than artist, and ISAM is the culmination of his studies.

In addition, his live performance of ISAM is a fusion of music and visual arts, creating an image for the sound and making his music cinematic. He is touring the U.S. and MoogFest should be the highlight of the tour.