How Do You Live
Following Amon Tobin’s landmark 2011 album *ISAM*, the Brazilian-born, Bay Area-based electronic musician threw himself into live performance, and while he chased new horizons in video-mapping and other audiovisual technologies, his studio output tapered off for a spell. But beginning in 2019, he kicked off a wildly prolific period. That year, Tobin released two albums under his own name plus another as Only Child Tyrant, his “rock” alias; over the next two years, he released a new LP under his hip-hop-oriented Two Fingers moniker, the inaugural release from his folk-influenced Figueroa project, and the debut of still another new alias, Stone Giants. On *How Do You Live*, the ever-restless musician sounds reinvigorated by his recent rambles: His sound design as breathtaking as ever, he confidently strides far beyond the familiar hallmarks of past albums. “How Do You Live” opens the record with a shape-shifting fusion of chamber strings, ambient atmospheres, and metal drumming; “Rise to Ashes” strikes up a conversation with The Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows”; and “Sweet Inertia” (featuring Figueroa) slips further down the lysergic rabbit hole, acoustic guitars crumbling to digital dust as he plunges deeper. Tobin has always been a masterful shaper of textures, and his sounds have never been more vividly tactile than they are here. Throughout, it sounds like a battle is being waged between acoustic instruments—guitars, drums, strings—and the all-consuming digital maw, and the tension that results is truly awesome to behold. Somehow, Tobin has managed to apply the complexity of Autechre to the grooves of psychedelic rock, and the output sounds even more mind-bending than you’d expect. Tobin has always been in a class of his own, and that’s doubly true of *How Do You Live*: There’s simply no one else making music like this.
Brazilian electronic producer Amon Tobin offers up a collection of songs that's eclectic even by his own genre-hopping standards on How Do You Live.
Perennial electronic wizard pushes yet further into unexplored, sometimes loud, always compulsive terrain. Review by Thomas H Green.