Long Stories

Much like its immediate predecessor, Long Stories presents a radically different Amon Tobin, one all but unrecognizable as the jazz-and-breaks connoisseur of his early albums. A companion to Fear in a Handful of Dust, released just six months prior, it’s an ethereal excursion in pure texture. Where that album pursued knotty, atonal flights of fancy inspired by the 20th century’s most adventurous composers, Long Stories moves into almost shockingly pretty terrain, rolling out great billowing clouds of consonance, with echoes of German kosmische and harp-plucking New Age folded gently into the mix. The consistency of the album’s gossamer palette comes down to the lone instrument Tobin used to create it: a broken Suzuki Omnichord, whose simplistic blips Tobin renders (with the help of serious post-processing) as a pastel wash of quicksilver tone. From one of electronic music’s greatest sleight-of-hand artists, the album’s unabashed romanticism is the equivalent of laying all his cards on the table.