Return To The Foley Room

The Foley artist is responsible for the vast array of incidental or atmospheric sound effects that occur in a movie or TV production; this is where Amon Tobin’s album Foley Room gets its name, but it’s quite surprising that he had been so unfamiliar with microphones up until this point…

Tobin Mixes It Up

The video below is a short documentary about the making of the Foley Room album. Tobin is a master of production, but he admits here that he hadn’t used a microphone on any of his previous recordings.

In fact, the names of his albums give a clue as to the process he followed in making them; Foley Room of course is based on microphone recordings of real world sounds, but his earlier works – Supermodified, Bricolage, Permutation – are essentially reworkings of samples, taking other people’s work and bending it into undeniably new and original creations.

In fact, if there were any lingering doubts about the legitimacy of sampling as a musical artform, then surely Tobin’s repertoire (alongside countless others) dispels them. The fact that he managed to create so many influential and unique albums without ever dipping into the microphone chest is remarkable in itself; but his field recording adventures open up even more possibilities…