Amon Tobin is one of my favorite electronic music artists. Everything he does is very evocative, almost cinematic, if only action movies were this good. He has his own unmistakable style, yet it is more a planet than a palette, which is very hard to pull off as an artist. Which is why it is odd that it took me so long to grab his last full-length album, especially considering it is high definition surround mix on DVD-Audio. I suppose the fact that it was a game soundtrack (”Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell 3″) was a stumbling block for me. How good could incidental music loops for yet another first person shooter be? I needn’t have been so cautious. It’s a great album. Maybe not his best, but it’s up there. Moody and atmospheric, yet driving and adrenaline-pumping all at once. Vintage Amon Tobin. Also, this time there are credits to actual performing musicians, including an orchestra. Now I understand — writing for a game was just a way to get someone to front the money for even more grand sound sculpting options. The surround mix is very well done, allowing the spatial placement of sounds to become almost another instrument.
I had assumed I’d have to borrow a friend’s CD version of this album in order to rip the tracks and import them into iTunes. To my surprise, when you put the disk in your computer there is a directory full of sound files. Both surround AAC (which iTunes doesn’t yet support) and high resolution stereo versions were included. That’s what won me over and inspired this post. Kudos to Ninja Tunes and Amon Tobin for this forward thinking, and for not treating their customer like a criminal. In a perfect world, this would be the future of music distribution.
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