Production Advice

This is an enjoyable short film about the making of Amon Tobin’s excellent Foley Room – a great album which you may already know about. If not, I strongly recommend it.

I talk a lot about classic albums, recording live instruments and ¨real, natural sound¨ on Production Advice, mainly because in this time of virtual instruments and laptop recording studios I think it’s becoming something of a lost art that needs highlighting.

BUT I have always had a passion for electronic and dance music – Jean Michel Jarre’s ‘Oxygene’ was the second tape ever played in my Sanyo personal cassette player (I couldn’t afford a Walkman !) and it would be hard to overstate the importance of Orbital in my music collection – to pick just two examples.

(What was the first tape ever played in my Walkman ? It’s too embarrassing to reveal in public, but ask me on Twitter and I’ll DM you the answer :-p )

More than anything, I love it when these two genres collide, and that’s very much the case with Foley Room. I love the fact that Amon Tobin starts out by saying that in ten years of music-making, he’d never used a microphone ! But on this CD he enlisted the help of ¨real¨ musicians like the Kronos Quartet, as well as recording a wild selection of real-word sounds to be processed and used in the writing process.

The video speaks for itself, but do look out for the section where Amon and his team heroically fail to record anything interesting from a pleasingly wide selection of animals – and, make sure you watch past the end credits, that’s where lots of the best bits are !

Thanks to @mikehillier for sending me the link to the video.

If you enjoyed this post, you might also like these:

How to make music from sand (And, why you would want to)

Personality In Audio – or, Why sounding great just isn’t enough

David Vorhaus and The White Noise – Electronic music pioneers

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