Much attention has been focused in the advance press for Montreal-based sound auteur Amon Tobin’s upcoming ‘Foley Room’ album upon the complex and unorthodox sample manipulation processes that have gone into its making; Amon and his trusty team of assistants apparently making field recordings of everything from insects masturbating to cats devouring rats. This download-only single finally gives eager listeners a chance to have a taste of the upcoming full-length (released March 5), with two distinctly different album tracks included alongside a previously unreleased B-side not included on the upcoming album.

Lead track ‘Bloodstone’ offers the first taste of what lays in wait in the Foley Room, with eerie treated, poisoned sounding strings and piano chords opening things on an orchestral tip that’s equal parts Morricone and mournful Eastern European lament, the sliding snares and twinkling piano chords warping subtly like liquid metal as a vast beat that sounds like it’s been constructed from the most corroded scrap-iron treads a doomy path through the second half. From there, things wander out into a bleeding wash of spinechilling strings, the vast ominous finale section apparently created completely out of sounds sampled during guest players Kronos Quartet’s tuning-up session.

While this first offering clearly represents ‘Foley Room’s spectral cinematic side, ‘Esthers’ easily represents one of the album’s most furiously beat-driven moments, in this case Tobin’s own unique take on the surf-guitar music tradition that replaces the genre’s typically chugging guitar line with what sounds like the noise of a huge Harley Davidson engine revving, with added sampled wasps adding just the right amount of evil edge. Toss in scything metallic breakbeats that hark back to Amon’s own classic ‘Verbal’ single and you’ve certainly got aural destruction on a big system – it’s fair to say that ‘Esthers’ is definitely the track you’ll be reaching for to lay devastation upon the more hard-headed of dancefloors. Finally, previously unreleased track ‘Here Comes The Moon Man’ offers a taste of Tobin’s recent score for independent Hungarian movie ‘Taxedermia’, with digitally tweaked cymbals and strings evoking associations with the metallic clang of Indonesian gamelan, before razor-sharp drums take things down through a spectral forest of shifting cinematic ambience, free-jazz drums and delicate woodwinds; from a listen to this, the film doesn’t exactly sound like lighthearted stuff. No matter – diehard fans will as always delight in being drawn once again into Tobin’s ever-expanding soundworld, and even if ‘Bloodstone’ doesn’t exactly come across as one of the more obvious first choices of single, there’s certainly one long scary trip ahead…

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