SOUND QUALITY 5 STARS
SELECTION 5 STARS
BANG FOR THE BUCK 5 STARS


FORMAT: Audio CDs & CD-ROMs (Kurzweil, Roland, SampleCell Akai/E-mu/ Ensoniq ASR formats)

OVERVIEW: Instrumental and vocal performances and individual samples from various African cultures.

LICENSING: Voluntary contribution to African relief agencies when used commercially.

Following up on last year's Heart of Asia, Spectrasonics has unleashed another world music monster in Heart of Africa. For ambient techno and alternative dance producers, these discs will be a feast of auditory delights. They might also come in handy if you're trying to put together a soundbed for a PBS or Discovery Channel spot. Overall, the packages have more vocal and percussion material than the Asia set and less in the way of wind instruments and plucked strings. The best stuff, or at least the most evocative, maybe the traditional tribal choir phrases, but you'll also find plenty of playable kalimbas, snappy clay pot percussion, and so on. "The emotion, energy and spontaneity of the performances is wonderful" , noted fellow reviewer Ernie Rideout.

In case you're trying to decide between the Audio CDs or the CD-ROMs, it's not simply a question of whether you have time to do the sampling yourself. The ROM versions contain numerous samples not found on the audio discs. And while the CD-ROM programming appears, at first blush, to be rather basic, hundreds of hours of work went into the truncating and developing, so if you've got the right SCSI gear, the CD-ROM will probably be worth the extra cost.

Let's start with the audio discs. In Vol. 1, disc A, most of the multisampled choir notes sustain for a couple of seconds and then release. On close listening, though, the original recordings were shorter; they were looped (extremely well) and then played back digitally from a sampler to create the CD. This is not necessarily bad, because it's guaranteed that there's a superior loop point somewhere in the audio. On the other hand, part of the point of having long choral samples is to take advantage of the natural variations that occur during the tone, and you won't get those variations with this material. The choir tones are generally less in tune than a classically trained choir would be, but this is part of the stylistic charm of the samples. Choir whispers and shouts are also provided, as are a couple of "Chromazones™", in which a vocal phrase is sung at (not pitch-shifted to) all 12 chromatic pitches, suitable for use in any key. With the choir Mmm's and Ooh's, one or more samples are given at each note in a couple of octaves of major scale.

The next section contains handclaps, footstamps, and fingersnaps, plus rainsticks, metal rattles, and Tanzanian dancing bells (like the choir multisamples, already looped in some cases). The lion's share of the disc is devoted to hundreds of single samples of percussion -- giant sangba drums from Guinea suitable for either substitute dance kicks or world music, Kenyan slit drums, logs from Madagascar, Nigerian udu, lots of talking drums and so on.

Wind instrument lovers may find the flute and kudu horn samples useful. The clay flute doodles have a definite sample-and-hold flavor, while the pitch-bent trills are reminiscent of birdcalls. The Pygmy hunting pipes are too squeaky to be attractive, but the heavily ambient hunting horns from Mozambique (16 samples) would work well in a movie soundtrack. The sustained solo flute tones have a nice clay character, and the sustained tones are very even, suitable for looping.

The multisample-ready scales on kalimba and m'bira are almost humorous because of the major differences in tone from note to note, but that's the way these instruments actually sound. Many of them are provided in a diatonic scale layout over an octave or two; a few come only in C-G format. Most of these samples are mono.

Vol. 1 disc B, kicks off with a variety of choir phrase samples, first the men (eight tracks, several samples per track) and then the women (five tracks, ditto). Vocal solo phrases are also provided. The triadic harmonies used by the choirs are European, but the words and chord voicing are African. The choirs' intonation ranges from gorgeous to ...well, ethnic. The vocal solo phrases are probably more adaptable harmonically; their emotional quality ranges from intimate and sinister (recorded fairly dry) to melancholy (lots of room ambience). With the "Little African Girl" track (nine solo phrases) the hall was so dominant that I couldn't help wishing the recordist had had the sense to take the girl into a smaller room.

The amazing "Soweto Male Vocal Noises", "South African Male Interjections," "Zulu Warrior Outbursts," and "Female Whoops, Raves & Ululating" (upwards of a hundred mono samples) offer a spirited alternative to scratching in a hip-hop mix. But if you really want to do the groove thing, set your CD player to tracks 40 and 41, where African percussion loops are remixed into solid 120 bpm "linear style" arrangement construction kits. Once your appetite is whetted, you'll be ready for the loop-ready samples of djembe, Nigerian udu, Tanzanian metal bracelets, cowbell, Ghanaian shaker, Moroccan dumbek, and more. Approximate bpm numbers are given for this material, but especially with the shakers you'll hear some natural fluctuation in tempo, even in a short sample.

Although they're far from being the focus of the CD, you'll find a handful of electric guitar and sax section samples in a very characteristic African pop style. The kalimba, m'bira and berimbau loops are more numerous and also more interesting, with their non-European tunings, delicate lurching rhythms, and performance noises (the latter including wordless voice on some tracks). The half-dozen "buzz xylo" loops are extremely odd, but they could be a breath of fresh air in a -- come to think of it, I'm not sure what kind of music they'd fit into, but they are cool. The CD-ROM versions of these phrases happened to be the first banks I loaded. Being mainly familiar with single-note m'bira patches in synthesizers, I wasn't quite prepared for the buzzy halo that surrounds the instrument when it is being played. Along with the pitched rhythm is a kind of gourd shaker effect that's almost continuous. According to ER, "The buzzes and rattles that adorn the sounds of many African wind and percussion instruments are an essential expressive element. It's great that Spectrasonics has captured them."

The tribal ensemble phrases and songs seem to aim straight at the documentary soundtrack genre, but they may have more avant-garde uses. Rattles, light drumming, clapping, call-and-response vocals, and occasional ululations make a subdued but powerful impression. There's far more material of this type on Vol. 2 -- speaking of which, Vol. 1 ends with a teaser section containing a couple of dozen samples that are similar to what you'll hear on Vol. 2, mostly choral performances in traditional styles. The material is not duplicated on Vol.2, however.

The vocal performance samples in Vol. 2 are strongly evocative. Some of the phrases are eight bars or so in length, and many involve solo voices, choir, footstamping, whistles and percussion in some combination -- or all together. A vocal solo might include yodels, gargles, or blurbles a an integral part of the line: We're talking flavor here. There's also some room ambience, as the tapes were recorded on location, but the sound is surprisingly clean and consistent throughout.

Most of the choirs sing (or speak) traditional folk chants; a few use European harmony in a charming African gospel style. The booklet gives key and tempo information for both types of singing, but it's important to understand that the data may be an approximation. Tempo and pitch fluctuate audibly in some of the performances, so you'll have to do a bit of fudging to get it to fit it not a computerized tune -- but again, that's part of the flavor.

A typical track on this CD might include upwards of a dozen samples drawn from the same folk song (for instance, a Kikuyu song performed by the women during harvest time). You might hear a soloist singing a phrase, and then a choir singing the same phrase, or a melody sung quietly first, and then sung more loudly with footstamping. The fact that you're hearing segments from one song rather than isolated excerpts gives you a lot more ways to build a piece. you don't have to just grab a two-bar bit and loop it.

ER complained about the shortage of information on some of the source materials: "It'd be nice to know what cultures, language groups, and regions all of the performers come from." English translations of the lyrics would have added another vital dimension, but perhaps that's too much to ask. We're told that more information will be made available on ILIO Entertainments' Web site (http://www.ilio.com)

Vol. 2 ends with two dozen tracks of African nature sounds. You won't hear any of those cliched chimp hoots, though. Instead, how about a vervet monkey chattering and screaming? How about a hippo grunting and snorting in a pool of water for over a minute? How about a herd of wildebeest running away? (No, that's not the A&R department when they hear your demo.)

The CD-ROM versions have plenty of musical resources, and far more stuff than we can describe in this review. Some of the coolest samples on the CD-ROM are in the REMIX directory. Only three banks, but the TRANCE bank (8.50 Mb) has a keyboard layout with ten different but related rhythm loops, perfectly synchronized and ready to go at 80 bpm. Most of the loops are eight beats long, and they have an identical booming bass drum on every beat. In between beats you'll hear conga type drums, rattles, and other stuff. Hard to say whether the performances are authentic or whether they were sequenced in the studio; they sound sequenced, but they're fairly authentic in style, not funk-inspired. The K-2000's mod wheel introduces LFO-to-lowpass- filter modulation that's more or less in sync with the rhythm, so that every other beat gets swallowed -- a neat effect.

The DJEMBE bank (8.5Mb), also in the REMIX directory, offers 13 one-bar loops at 120 bpm. Again, there's a good variety of related beats, some with shakers, some with sticks tapping the rim of a drum, some with the low-pitched drum a fifth higher. In this bank the mod wheel introduces a very cool "backwards loop" effect. In fact, the loop doesn't reverse direction; all that happens is that a fast (about 8Hz) LFO is used to add tremolo, but this removes the attack from selected drum sounds so they sound a bit like they're backing up.

The phrase loops in the MLT PHRS (mallet phrase) directory don't lend themselves well to 4/4 time; a couple fall into a clear 9/8, but others lurch markedly, with no clear beat at all. Even so, buzz xylophone, slit drum, and bent marimba loops are bound to be good for something. The programs in the directory do very little, however, to enhance the phrases musical usefulness. I would have liked to hear more creative programming throughout the Kurzweil CD-ROM, but Eric Persing of Spectrasonics emphasized that these CD-ROMs are oriented toward realistic performance, not synthetic sound design. Useful touches like real-time control over the effects mix are included in all of the programs.

The dry balphone multisample is gorgeous, but the ambient balaphone is so ambient that it's likely to be useful only for a special effect. The ambient slit drum samples are more usable; my only complaint is that I don't like playing the keyboard and hearing the ambience get shorter and shorter as the sample is transposed.

The log drums, also in this directory, are very deep and meaty, and the marimbas are wonderfully playable on the keyboard. The velocity-to-filter modulation on the small marimba allows a lot of musical control. It's a bit odd to hear these traditional instruments in 12 tone equal temperment, but traditional tunings are included for many of them.The traditional-tuning slit drum key map has 20 different samples -- enough for a very colorful rhythm breakdown.

I'm a big fan of the udu, a clay pot drum that's played with the hands, so I was delighted to find plenty of crisp udu samples. No less than 64 separate samples are laid out across the keyboard in a single program. Pitch-bends and characteristic performances flourishes are included, along with a variety of soft and hard taps at several different pitches of the drum. In this program, the pitch wheel bends up and down by an octave, while the mod wheel bends downward by two octaves, turning even a simple drum slap into a breathy crunch. The same modulation routing is used throughout the PERC FX directory, which features some stimulating castanet, necklace and "metal rain" loops.

The AF ATMOS bank (6.5 Mb) has a dozen assorted samples of crickets and river noises, all very peaceful and exotic. Here, the mod wheel adds stereo panning under the control of a slow LFO. In AF CROWD (12 Mb) we get four long segments of men talking in the marketplace, complete with footsteps, rustling of baskets, and whatever. The atmospheres directory (AFRO SFX) contains half a dozen banks of this type, including CHEERING and BIRDMEN.

Turning to the HUMAN FX directory, I found three banks: FEET, HANDS, and MOUTH. The hands, of course, are handclaps -- quite a varied assortment of both groups and solo claps, totalling almost 12 Mb. Only a few rhythm loops are provided; mostly these are single claps, suitable for any tempo. Some of the group claps are obviously stereo, and the solo claps tend to have stereo ambience. Three stereo samples of group fingersnapping are also included. The keymapping of the claps is somewhat inconsistent: Some of the menu-type keymaps (those with a different sample assigned to each key) use only the white keys, while others use every key in a chromatic range. The same is true of many other banks on the disc: If you don't play a quick chromatic scale to see what's on the black keys, you may be missing half the fun.

CONCLUSIONS: Like pharmacologists spreading out through the jungle in search of potent new drugs, musicians with portable DAT decks are bringing back an amazing assortment of musical experiences that any sampler owner can use. And as with vegetable alkaloids, some of the samples will be more useful than others. But if you'd like to spice up your tracks with a dose of real African flavor, it's hard to see how you could go wrong with Heart of Africa . Crafting the right musical setting for these loops may be a challenge, but one thing's for sure: nobody will think you sampled the chorus from the civic light opera in Newport, Rhode Island.

---Jim Aikin