Drove out to San Diego, California today. I was accompanied by Brinn Aaron who was also intrigued about seeing Amon Tobin tonight. First stop in town was to pick up my daughter Jessica – who’d never been to a performance of electronic music! And this wasn’t just any gig either, it was Amon’s ISAM 2.0 show, he’s been at the forefront of projection mapping adding a major new element to stage performance. Working with Vello Virkhaus of V Squared Labs and his team of evil geniuses, these guys have built a “screen” – if you can call it that, it’s more a 3D cubic form that stretches across the stage and towers high above, that acts as the video screen. Projected onto those cubes are mapped video images and special effects that quite often are in sync with the music, but are always a great compliment to the glitchy throb of Amon’s beats. Almost inconspicuously embedded within the cube structure is a ‘bigger’ cube – it’s the DJ booth where Amon’s working. At the mixing desk is Peter Sistrom, a member of V Squared, but he’s not working the audio mix, he’s operating midi panels that are triggering visual events that are pouring out of Derivative’s Touch Designer into some high powered projectors that are beaming a flow of visual beauty onto the stage.

The show was amazing with a lot of consideration given to the quality of the sound system that hammered away at the audience and vibrated more than a few of my internal organs. Somewhere after the end of the tour, the stage will likely be burned in a bonfire somewhere in the Mojave desert – I can only hope that the next tour is even more extravagant than this two hours of perfection I watched tonight.

Photo credit: Jessica Aldridge