Don’t call it a side project. Each step Amon Tobin has taken in his 25 year spanning career has been measured and purposeful, and he doesn’t see any statement as divided from the others. Speaking on his new project, West Coast Love Stories, under the moniker of Stone Giants, he explains:
“Everything continues to develop in parallel and everything has its own identity, but it also cross pollinates and one thing informs the other. Each one is as vital to me as the other. Nomark [his label] 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.”
As he’s enthusiastically done before, Tobin is exploring the, as a press release states, “relationship between voice and machine”, albeit from a very new perspective. As the album’s title readily implies, this is music that explores love, no less, a consistent story told across the LP’s duration, with each track nonetheless standing on its own.
Drawing inspiration from the likes of Elliott Smith, Soft Machine, Brian Wilson, and Kraftwerk alike, West Coast Love Stories expertly blends all these seemingly disparate worlds into something altogether refreshing and more than a bit disconcerting.
After all, there’s yet to be a soul in human history who truly understands love, let alone one who can define it, so the album openly digs into that pleasant, tortuous wound, with its distorted words manipulated into sheer noise, representing, as Tobin puts it, “a feeling [that] is real but impossible to put into words. If anything words get in the way and make things harder to understand.”
Listen to the latest single “Metropole” below or on streaming platforms.
Stone Giants’ West Coast Love Stories comes out on July 2 through Nomark. You can find Amon Tobin on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
