AMG
Apr 1, 2001 12:00 PM, Chris Gill
When most people think of chill-out music these days, they usually envision mellow R&B, light jazz, or down-tempo pop. But the samples in this collection don't sound anything like Bent — they simply are bent, evocative of the trippy ambient textures one used to hear in the chill-out room (remember those?) at a rave during the acid-house days. Even if you're not interested in reviving the ambient-techno genre, these deep, dark, and at times creepy and unsettling sounds are perfect for a wide variety of music, including trance, industrial, techno, and drum ’n’ bass.
The Chill Out Room (one audio and one WAV CD, $99.95) was created using a battery of classic analog synths such as the Sequential Circuits Prophet 5, Roland Jupiter 8, Arp 2600, Korg MS-20, and EMS VCS3. The liner notes encourage you to “explore the darkest recesses of synthesis” — and that's exactly what this collection does. Most of its sounds are very electronic and processed to the hilt with wonderfully subversive effects.
The collection consists of 90 tracks. The first one is a somewhat serene demo tune that gives few hints of the audio perversion that follows, and the last one is a test tone. Even so, you can sic your sampler on nearly 70 minutes of material from The Chill Out Room.
The samples are arranged in five sections: Atmospheres, Loops, Sequences, Single Note Synths, and Dub Events and Synth FX. The Atmospheres are long sustained sounds, ranging from 12 to 84 seconds, that twist, turn, and transform over time. The Atmospheres make great background beds for a track, but they're also a lot of fun to chop up and use as grist for sonic experimentation. If you're looking for more rhythmic material, the Loops are your best bet — most of them are percussive patterns. The electronic-sounding Loops are heavily processed with tape echo, filters, distortion, reverb, and other effects, which gives them dark, crunchy, surreal textures. The Sequences are not exactly melodic lines, but they can be best described as grooves with melodic flavors: most of them are very trippy, but some also have that happy-go-lucky sound of ’80s synth pop.
Although the Single Note Synths are designed for multisampling (several notes of the same sound are included for this purpose), many are somewhat long and rhythmic. This may make their use in pad performances tricky without extensive tweaking (unless you prefer all of your sounds out of sync). The most unusual sounds reside in the Dub Events and Synth FX area — a variety of shortwave radios, freaky resonant blips, static lunar storms, and miscellaneous sorts of VCS3 squeaks and squawks that haven't been heard since Dr. Who went off the air.
If you want to sound like Groove Armada or Thievery Corporation, look elsewhere. But if your tastes run toward the oblique and experimental, The Chill Out Room is one space you'll want to lock yourself inside for days.
Overall Rating (out of 5): 4.5
AMG, dist. by East West; tel. (800) 969-9449; e-mail info@soundsonline.com;
Web www.soundsonline.com
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