Power FX
Jan 1, 2001 12:00 PM, James Rotondi
Lo-Fi and Illbient It's Christmas every day in the sample-CD world if you like your breaks fast and furious, block-rockin', or house-approved. But what if your percussion predilections bend more toward a spacey, stony groove - the kind of lazy, cheeba-inflected, tripped-out head-nodders that down-tempo specialists and illbient iconoclasts go for? Don't worry, buzz-boy - there's a sample CD for you, too, and I don't mean Distorted Reality.
Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky, and several fellow illbeings have concocted Lo-Fi and Illbient (audio CD, $99.95), a rangy collection of breaks and sound effects that reflect their creators' obsessions with sampledelica, ambient-dub, neuro-funk, and abstract hip-hop. Be warned that many of these breaks are already processed - filtered, delayed, flanged, compressed to infinity - so you're dealing with samples that already have a lot of sonic personality. It's a trade-off: you can look for drier breaks that leave you with some room for your own processing, but you'd be hard-pressed to find a sample CD with more innate character than this one.
The CD includes more than 150 beats, ranging in tempo from 80 to 120 bpm and featuring lots of sizzling hi-hats, crunchy snare hits, flangy cymbals, and weird percolating Space Echo patches, while the 50 "Collage" samples are thick pastiches of musique concrete-type sound. Particularly amazing are the "Sci-FX" and the 100-plus dubby "FX in Time" samples: jagged time-warp jet engines, swooshy tornado gusts, clanging church bells, mosquitoes from hell, and printing-press clackety-clack, all with easily definable rhythms and tempos that work beautifully slowed down, sped up, or stretched to match tempos in both Steinberg Cubase and Mark of the Unicorn Digital Performer.
The bass samples are a little less inspiring - too high-end and pretend-funky, and not nearly subsonic enough for truly stony palates - though many of the guitar samples, particularly the "Ethereal Guitar" series, are very cool. Using ring modulators, whacked-out distortion boxes, feedback, and cheapo-tone machines, guitarist Cameron Hatami comes up with some truly sick and very funky "Junk Jazz" guitar parts; I was less enamored, though, of the "Mad Arab Guitar" (more like "Out-of-Tune Guitar") samples. The CD also has a nice slew of Ornette-flavored, beat-up tenor- and soprano-sax bits; flute; needle and tape noise (at last!); and unfortunately some tossed-off vocal samples that wouldn't be missed much if they'd been left out altogether. (Why not include more cool breaks?)
You won't find any isolated individual drum or instrument hits here (this isn't a construction kit in the pure sense), but you get a surplus of trippy, brainiac-friendly material in Lo-Fi and Illbient. It's the kind of grainy, lysergic content you won't find on Buttabreaks 324. Now all you need is a copy of The Martian Chronicles and some kind.
| Want to use this article? Click here for options! |  |
