There are few musical genres that Stone Giants’ creative mastermind Amon Tobin hasn’t explored, but on his current album, West Coast Love Stories, he’s found his home. He tells Prog about creative freedom, romantic inspiration and why playing live isn’t a top priority.

Words: Julian Marszalek

From hip hop beats to prog : who is the real Amon Tobin?

AMON TOBIN

“There were moments when I got known for certain things and it felt as if someone was trying to put a limitation on what I could do.”

Amon Tobin is a sonic architect of many guises. Since his highly acclaimed 1997 album, Bricolage, the Brazilian-born musician and producer has traversed a singular path that has seen him first using drum’n’bass and sampling as a springboard through to work that’s harnessed the studio as an instrument to create electronic sound designs that defy easy categorisation.

Along the way, Tobin’s musical curiosity has seen him adopt a number of aliases to explore a variety of flavours and styles. His Two Fingers project found him inspired by dubstep and grime, and elsewhere, his Figueroa banner pushed at the boundaries of psychedelia and folk, while Only Child Tyrant’s dark electronica has stretched his vision further. His solo material since the release of 2011’s ISAM has seen Tobin moving further into the territories of intense soundscaping. And this is before we consider his position as head of his own record label, Nomark, which was launched to give him even greater control of his artistic vision and business affairs. Now he’s back as Stone Giants, whose aural, electronic vistas in the form of the album West Coast Love Stories explore the nature of that most powerful of emotions. Almost impossible to pigeonhole, this is a record where man and machine fuse to demand total immersion by the listener for maximum reward.