Q-Up Arts
Feb 1, 2001 12:00 PM, James Rotondi
Tonal Textures
David Torn's
Pandora's Toolbox
With titles like “To Burble and Pine” and “Subtonia in Chrome,” it's immediately evident that the loops on David Torn's two sample CDs are out of the ordinary. Created primarily using processed and looped electric guitars, the samples are idiosyncratic entities: utterly nonguitaristic for the most part, they instead resemble sound installations or ambient swatches, sometimes Eno-esque but always interesting and unexpected.
Fans of Torn albums such as Tripping over God, What Means Solid, Traveller? and his latest Splattercell release, OAH (see “Profiles” in this issue), will recognize the loops' outer-space sonics and gurgling resonance and will also have an idea of how to use them. Producers will find a trove of usable material, with textural jumping-off points for loop-based composition in almost any genre — drum ’n’ bass, two-step, industrial, ambient, and especially hard-core techno. Lest the word ambient throw you off, rest assured that a good number of these loops are scary, nasty, and subversive.
Tonal Textures (audio CD, $99; Akai CD-ROM, $199) is the more hi-fi of the two; it's packed with sky-blue tonal color, longer cyclical loops, and an emphasis on free time, letting you to sample and paste with less concern for syncopation or time-stretching.
The spookier, more lo-fi-leaning Pandora's Toolbox (audio CD, $99; Acid format, $69; Akai or Roland CD-ROM, $199) offers plenty of free-time loops but also many rhythmic loops, some with cool ethnic percussion mixed with guitars and other instruments. Torn's documentation is superb and meticulously detailed. For example, the notes for the loop titled “The Original Dr. 8” specify that it occurs 1:04:42:17 into the CD, lasts for 34:16 seconds, runs at a tempo of “approx.” 84.146 bpm, includes four repeats of four bars in 3/4, and has a harmonic reference of A#m7b13. Finally, Torn summarizes the loop as “outlining the running emotional subtext, ever-present beneath the exchanging of pleasantries w/a noted neurosurgeon.” Beat that.
Although these discs offer inventive ways to add guitar to your remixes or tracks, don't think of them as guitar CDs. Plenty of those are already on the market, packed with plinky faux-funk and cliché power riffs. Instead, adjust your thinking to somewhere between Distorted Reality, Ethno-Techno, tiny horror-film scores, post-New Age balms, exotic-rock fragments, and incandescent blasts of pure musical energy presented through the able fingers and nuanced cranium of one of modern guitar's bravest and most innovative instigators.
Overall Rating (out of 5): 4
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