Amon Tobin is gearing up to release West Coast Love Stories, his first album under the new moniker Stone Giants, which comes out next month. We recently heard “Metropole”, and today he follows it up with another song from the forthcoming album called “A Year To The Day”. He says:
“Your phone cheerfully recalls where you were this time last year. What executive committee decided it would be a good idea to have moments from your past randomly intrude on your present day? Memories you’ve either, carefully compartmentalized or buried so safe and deep you daren’t scroll through your photo history. Now at any moment you can be ambushed by an algorithmically generated montage of your most fragile memories set to music. It’s like an AI Psy-Op designed to send us into some kind of spiralling despair.”
I’m sure most of us kinda like the little reminders we get from Facebook and the like – especially as we turn off our cynicism and suspicions about who, why and how it has popped up. Amon Tobin doesn’t seem to have this switch – in fact he has one that goes the other way and cranks up the paranoia, and “A Year To The Day” seems to be him embodying the faceless AI and the power it has over the benumbed scroller. Creeping keys and silvery atmospherics set the scene for a tense traipse through Tobin’s isolated mind, his voice sweetly unsettling in its emotionless offering of “take a stroll through the blaze / if you want or if you don’t.” It’ll make you think twice about sharing a forgotten memory next time it pops up in your feed.
Listen to “A Year To The Day” below or on your preferred streamer.
Stone Giants’ West Coast Love Stories comes out on July 2 through Nomark. You can find Amon Tobin on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
