Amon Tobin surveys the damage after his 90-minute set (Photo Credit: Andrew Parks)

Words by Andrew Parks

“It looks like the West Memphis Three is trying to start a mosh pit down there.”

Welcome to the truly groundbreaking world that is Amon Tobin‘s ISAM tour; a sensory overload experience on par with the million dollar pyramid set Daft Punk brought to Brooklyn in 2007. Which is quite an achievement when you consider how crowd-pleasing Daft Punk’s music is—bright, bold swatches of filtered house, floor-filling electro and cracked disco— and how challenging it is to consume Tobin’s cold, harsh and undoubtedly heavy approach to interstellar hip-hop and piston-powered electronic music. On record, the Brazilian producer can sound like a pilot who’s knowingly plunged us into a black hole so horrifying we can’t look away as the ship begins to erode in a sea of splintered samples and battering ram beats. In other words, it’s music that’s tailor made for sci-fi movies, or at the very least, video games that feature lots of steely exteriors and explosions. (Sure enough, Tobin scored the game Chaos Theory: Splinter Cell 3.)