Zero-G
May 1, 2001 12:00 PM, James Rotondi
Defining trip-hop may be as difficult a pursuit as catching a butterfly, but the styles and tonal attitudes that the trip-hop net captures do signify something — a lazy, stony vibe rooted in hip-hop beats but as ephemeral as ambience. East West acknowledges this open-endedness, and although the roughly 450 samples it's packed into Pure Trip Hop (two CDs — audio/WAV/AIFF/REX/Acid and Akai, $49.95) do owe a nod to trip-hop's innovators — DJ Shadow, Luke Vibert, Portishead — it's taken the full creative liberty that the genre allows. In fact, Pure Trip Hop is less an emulation of existing styles than a new window on trip-hop itself — an original deconstruction kit, if you will. The collection offers a series of 70 fully arranged grooves, each broken down into its component parts: keys, bass, drum groove, kick, snare, synths, and so on. It's as if producer Domino was halfway through finishing an album in his own right, but stopped to give you first pickings of the goods.
Whether you dig Pure Trip Hop is really the question, although the CD offers plenty of isolated sounds that you can work into any context you like. It's an accessible kind of trip-hop sound: a bright, clear aesthetic along the lines of later Massive Attack or Morcheeba. There are certainly collections that offer more drum beats, but it's very cool that each of the 70-plus loops here is broken down into drum hits (snare, kick, hats). The quality of the grooves is uniformly excellent — crunchy and compressed, quantized with a little swing, and dry enough to leave the plug-in or processing choices up to you. But it's the keyboard and bass sounds that really stand out: throbbing, vinylized Wurlitzer chords; arcing Mellotron sweeps; 30 gorgeous electric piano samples; and loads of tony, acid jazz-approved electric bass riffs and lines. That's not to say that the drums aren't happening. In fact, the last few tracks of the CD pack in a whopping 75 kick hits, 50 snare hits, and 50 hi-hat samples. For a programming buff, it's pure ambrosia: MPC-2000 and SU700 users, look alive.
Pure Trip Hop provides its samples in a wide variety of formats that should cover just about all the bases except Kurzweil. (It is sad to see so many sample-CD manufacturers opting out of that once-common format.) Still, anyone can tap Pure Trip Hop's library of hip and very musical sound shards, all of which are notated in the booklet with bpm and tonality indications.
In the final analysis, the samples themselves satisfy the most basic criterion of a good sample: they're inspiring. From DJ Grazzhoppa to Tricky to the Grassy Knoll, that's really the only definition that trip-hop has ever needed.
Overall Rating (out of 5): 4
Zero-G/East West (distributor);
tel. (800) 969-9449 or (212) 541-7064;
e-mail sales@eastwestsounds.com;
Web www.soundsonline.com
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