teaser: Amon Tobin’s Isam set

“If you’re in a studio making an album you can easily say, “Fuck everyone, I’m making this music for me” … but if you are going to start standing up and inviting people to come and see you … You have to at least something that’s worth being there for.”

So says acclaimed electronic musician Amon Tobin, in his excellent and illuminating eMusic interview with Joe Muggs. The problem, for musicians whose primary instrument in the computer, is an old one; in the same interview, Tobin lamented the too-common sight of performers “hunched over their laptops” in front of a paying live audience. Tobin’s excellent new record, ISAM, is an even more challenging live proposition; it’s a clattering, chaotic patchwork of avant-garde experimental music — not exactly the sort of thing to that gets bodies moving in unison.

The mindblowing above video shows Tobin’s ingenious solution to the problem. For the live shows surrounding ISAM, he has stepped away from the traditional DJ set completely, and has commissioned a living, art-piece set design, one that will provide a large-scale live audio/visual experience to select cities around the world. The flashes of the set in the video are tantalizing: Q*Bert-like structures throbbing with an unearthly organic-green glow; images of pixels rippling across them like so much digital snow. It looks literally unbelievable, a synapse-fusing mind-meld of sound and sight that most visualizations of music fall well short of.

Download ISAM here, and check out our full interview with Tobin here.