Amon Tobin – ISAM

As a follow up to my Post on Amon Tobin @ Bloc , I’ve just found the whole ISAM show on YouTube….

Wonderment and joy… I don’t know how long Ninja Tune will allow it to stay up, but it’s really excellent to see it all again and in such amazing quality.

As I suggested before, you really don’t get anything of the sense of the scale and the all encompassing grandeur of the show, which is based on 3D digital mapping projected onto a set made of cubes which you occasionally get a glimpses of as the lights and colours change and mutate. The larger, darker cube in the center is where Mr. Tobin stands, creating his music and doing what he does….

A timely reminder of something I’ll never forget….

Amon Tobin @ Bloc 2012

I write this on the Saturday afternoon that I should be getting into the mood for the second day of Bloc 2012, the new East London festival billed as a celebration of all things electronica.. (i.e. everything i really like about music)

Well as you may or may not know by now, Bloc was closed down last night due to overcrowding and health & safety issues, and today has been cancelled, so we won’t now get to see Orbital, Flying Lotus, Squarepusher, Ellen Allien, Space Dimension Controller or Battles…

To be honest, right from the off you tell there was something not quite right. We got there at about 5pm, as I wanted to see the Steve Reich show. Getting in was pretty easy for us as we had express tickets, but from then on it was queues all the way: into the arenas, onto the boat, at the bar… all ridiculously long and seemingly unnecessary, like nothing we’ve experienced before (and I’ve been going to festies for about 17 years)

It took us about 30 minutes to get onto the (admittedly pretty amazing) MS Stubnitz where, bathed in the glorious setting sun and nodding along to some pretty cool techno we stayed for an hour or so before heading over to see Amon Tobin and his ISAM show in one of the biggest tented structures I’ve ever been in…

I admit to only being vaguely aware of Amon Tobin before last night, a few tracks on Ninja Tune compilations that never really grabbed me, but having now witnessed something, the like of which I have never seen before in my life, I am a believer…

His difficult, strangely organic and at times bowel tremblingly powerful music was played through the most amazingly clear and fantastically loud sound system and was accompanied by a truly mind bending digital mapping show. Projected onto a 3 dimensionally cubed backdrop, the constantly changing shapes, colours, textures and forms were perfectly synched to Tobin’s soundscapes, creating an almost unimaginable experience. After about 20 minutes, Tobin was revealed to be standing within part of the structure in a translucent control box, nodding away and doing whatever it he does to make this future music…

Check out the ISAM album here on Spotify. As I said it’s not easy… slow, quiet and almost alien like in places then countered with soaring dub step, planet sized outbursts and intense shocks of machine noise, compositions not seemingly based on any structure as such (in fact almost perversely unstructured) but mesmerising all the same. So whilst certainly not to everyone’s tastes, see it live and loud, and I would challenge anyone not to be impressed..

It’s a real shame that last night’s Bloc turned to shit, and that today won’t happen. The rumors are that the tickets were  seriously oversold (25,000 instead of the agreed 15,000 per day) hence leading to the horrendous overcrowding and police intervention. If this festival failed because of greed, then the organisers should be ashamed of themselves for ruining such a potentially amazing experience.

I’ll finish with a couple of videos that I took last night. You don’t get any of the sense of scale or theatre of Tobin’s ISAM show, but they give an idea of the imagery and sound, whilst the photo at the end is of him standing in front of the structure onto which it was all projected.

Stealth @ The Blue Note

Quite by chance, I recently came across this excellent post on The Quietus.com. It’s triggered a huge bout of reminiscing and taken me on a real trip down memory lane…

I had the great fortune to be in the right place at the right time back in the mid 1990′s. My good friend Danny Kudos had a key role in distributing the Ninja Tune label throughout the world at the time, which meant that we got to go to one of London’s legendary clubs on a regular basis and almost always on the guest list.

My own personal memories of the club are now somewhat faded….

I remember Mr Scruff in the upstairs bar playing Bad Manners and Chas & Dave; I remember unbelievable six deck mixing action from Coldcut, all pre digital, all live, all done to perfection; I remember having my drink continually knocked as the downstairs room was effectively a corridor leading from the staircase at one end of the space to the other, and people always seemed to be on the move; I remember one night when a bright light suddenly shone out from behind me. As I turned around I was looking straight into a film camera, with the flash light reflecting from the very low ceiling. Christ knows what I looked like, but I later found out that my aunt and uncle had seen the footage (and recognised me) on local Nottingham TV news, a feature about ecstasy use in clubs would you believe… I remember quiet Japanese people standing against the walls never dancing, never smiling just being there, and I remember being so wasted one night at chucking out time that I very selfishly knocked on a friends door in nearby Haberdasher Street at 3.30am asking if I could stay the night as I couldn’t possibly make it home (she probably still hasn’t forgiven me, sorry Anna). And I vaguely remember crashing on the cushions up in the top room, talking bollocks and smiling a lot…

But most of all I remember having some of the best times it was possible to have on a Thursday night. The Blue Note was an amazing place, far too small really for what went on there, but excellent non the less. We also went to LTJ Bukem’s Logical Progression night there before he moved it to Turnmills, and Talvin Singh’s Anokha on a Monday night was a pretty amazing experience, although I think we only did that once or twice..

And all right Stealth finished too soon etc. etc.. but isn’t that what helps makes things great in hindsight…

Many thanks to Danny and The Ninja Tune crew for the few memories that I still have of those heady days in a pre-trendy Hoxton…

DJ Food has collected what looks like all the Stealth fliers on his brilliant site here, and they are all well worth a look (as is his whole site to be honest)