Amon Tobin‘s a musician who’s well known for his experiments in the world of sound, but it’s the release of his ISAM album and the subsequent tour that paved the way for a new way of experiencing electronic music live. With ISAM Live, and its bigger incarnation ISAM Live 2.0, Tobin took on tour a shape-shifting, projection mapped sculpture that surrounded him and treated the audience to an immersive audiovisual mind-meld.
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Tobin took field recordings of real life sounds and noises and wove them into intricately packed tracks for his “sound sculpture” album ISAM. The live shows took the sampled soundscape and used it to lift off on to another plane entirely, augmenting the album by having the visuals interact with the different songs.It was an experience that took meticulous planning, was storyboarded like a film script and was the product of a 36 hour brainstorming session. The sci-fi psychedelia that resulted was projection mapped by V Squared Labs onto the giant cubic structure, which was conceived by Heather Shaw from Vita Motus Design.
The stunning sights have enraptured audiences and blown minds across the globe since 2011 and now, sadly, (for those who never got to see it), the ISAM live show is coming to an end with the last performance in Paris at the Grande halle de la Villette on 13th March.“I had this idea of let’s make the thing into a sort of weird, abstract spaceship—or some adolescent fantasy of being in a spaceship.” Tobin notes in the video below when talking about the live show. “The whole thing was very carefully thought out in terms of the pacing of the show, the tracks themselves, what they would visually lend themselves to, but also how these things would all connect.”Photo: Calder WilsonIt amounted to a gargantuan effort on the part of Tobin and the artists and technicians involved, and what they achieved is a benchmark for experiencing electronic music live. The show may be over, but it’ll serve as inspiration for some time. “I’ve seen some very interesting things happen” says the show’s production designer Alex Lazarus, “but this project takes it above and beyond to the next level of what multimedia projection will turn into in the future”.Watch our videos on the ISAM and ISAM 2.0 show below
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