Mindfucking music. (Photo: Ninja Tune)

[by Andy Hermann]

The twitchiest, most forward-thinking artist on the Ninja Tune label -- and that's saying something -- Amon Tobin comes out of the same mid-'90s glitchcore scene as Squarepusher and Aphex Twin.

Lately, however, he's been leaving his peers in the dust.

Foley Room might be his most thrilling, mind-bending work to date, a bold extension of the dense, cinematic style he perfected on 2002's Out From Out Where . Made up mostly of found sounds and snippets of old movie soundtracks, the album is creepy as hell, but shot through with tinges of beauty, grandeur, and melancholy—like the ruins of a bombed-out cathedral in some sci-fi, H.R. Geiger fantasy.

Describing the music on Foley Room is like catching a tidal wave in a Dixie cup, as new sounds emerge with each listen. Harps and string quartets brush up against the sounds of creaky door hinges and riot batons dragged across prison cell bars; manic, drum-n-bass clatters of percussion fight it out with foggy-voiced church choirs; revving motorcycles morph into growling jungle cats and back again. It all builds to a stunning climax on "At the End of the Day," when Tobin finally breaks out one of his trademark, mutated string samples and resolves all that crazy noise into a single, stately chord.

Right now, nobody else is making electronic music on a canvas this big.

March 7, 2007