Stone Giants is the new alias of electronic musician Amon Tobin, and West Coast Love Stories is the forthcoming album arriving 2nd July on his Nomark label.
For 25 years Tobin has explored sound from unique and unconventional directions, and with Stone Giants he swerves again. His Nomark label has unleashed Only Child Tyrant’s dark-rock electronica, and Figueroa took a dive into psych-folk, and came up smiling. Stone Giants celebrates the relationship between voice and machine from an altogether different perspective – humans and electronics pooling resources to explore themes of love and being none the wiser for it. West Coast Love Stories celebrates the powerful, funny, frustrating emotion that love is, in all it’s hopeful and damned glory. To that Tobin adds, “Being exposed feels important when love stories are involved. After all, we need to risk making fools of ourselves if we’re to connect in any meaningful way.”
Today the first single and title track of the album is shared, which hints at the warm psychedelia that appears across the album. “West Coast Love Stories” is a glorious electronic pop song to get lost in, where beguiling melody and soft, hazy vocals take centre stage, with an undercurrent of melancholy that is never too far from the surface. Tobin comments,
“There’s nothing more cowardly than being cynical about love. Sneering from a safe distance at foolish aspirations destined for failure. Brazen lovers face plant into inevitable despair but only after experiencing the best life has to offer. The trade off is up for debate but in this song I try to capture what it feels like to be truly invested in a moment with someone.” – Amon Tobin
LISTEN TO THE NEW SINGLE “WEST COAST LOVE STORIES”
As the album title suggests, each song is like a chapter of the same story threaded together, yet distinct from one piece to the next. On West Coast Love Stories there are also sparks of krautrock and surf rock filtered through Amon’s singular electronic composition. A range of influences can also be heard, from Brian Wilson, Laurie Anderson, Elliot Smith, Kraftwerk, Simon & Garfunkel, and Soft Machine.
Stone Giants is both self-contained and inexorably linked to Amon’s other aliases, as Amon concludes,“There are no side projects on Nomark. Everything continues to develop in parallel and everything has its own identity, but it also cross pollinates and one thing informs the other.” He continues, “Each one is as vital to me as the other. Nomark is every ounce of my creative energy given freedom to explore disparate passions deeply and over time. Each alias is cocooned for between 6-10 years before it’s grown enough to release. This last alias, ‘Stone Giants’ is a milestone because now we all turn forwards and develop in tandem.”
TRACK LISTING:
West Coast Love Stories
Metropole
A Year To The Day
Best Be Sure (Feat. Figueroa)
A Well Run Road
Stinson Beach
Fairweather
The Girl With The Great Ideas (That I Steal)
Dad’s Big Camping Trip
All Of The Pillows
AMON TOBIN BIOGRAPHY
Amon Tobin’s life and work in sound design, spanning over 25 years, has produced some of the most important, era-defining records of his time. His work has continuously been setting the pace of sonic exploration and musical adventurism that has helped to shape much of what has come since.
Beginning in 1996 with Adventures in Foam the distinctive otherness of sound, which Tobin inhabited, was revealed. The musical and technological development of his production ideas through albums like Bricolage, Permuatation, Supermodified and Foley Room culminated in 2011’s ISAM album.
ISAM utilised advanced synthesis processing and production techniques traditionally reserved for sound design in film, and paved the way for a radically new kind of audio-visual performance. The pioneering use of projection mapping in a live performance, saw the landmark ISAM shows being rightly hailed around the world, from the Sydney Opera House to the Olympia in Paris to the Roundhouse in London, and many international festivals including Sonar, MUTEK, Coachella and Moogfest.
Amon spent eight years quietly developing a series of works under different aliases, alongside new material under his own name. These are now gradually being unveiled on the Nomark label.
2019 saw the release of Fear In A Handful of Dust and Long Stories. The first new alias ONLY CHILD TYRANT saw its debut Time To Run in the same year. In 2020 the long-awaited TWO FINGERS album Fight! Fight! Fight! was released to widespread acclaim and the FIGUEROA alias was revealed with an album, The World As We Know It, which was quickly hailed as an “album of the year.” The summer of 2021 sees the release of the third new alias STONE GIANTS; the debut album, West Coast Love Stories, is a record which celebrates the relationship between voice and machine from an altogether different perspective.
His long established reputation for musical ingenuity is unconfined by genre, and he remains one of the most visionary electronic artists of his generation.