5 STARS

This new offering from Spectrasonics is available in both audio CD and CD-ROM formats and is produced by Eric Persing, who's also well known for his work with Roland. The title of this compilation might equally well have been Beauty and the Beast because it contains both breathtakingly beautiful evolving pads plus some seriously distorted, twisted sounds that score highly on the aggression scale. If I had to compare Eric's sample creation work with anyone else, it would be David Torn or Ian Boddy, but even that doesn't tell you a lot!

After the opening demo, the disc starts off with a wonderful selection of ambient pads which have been created by layering and processing innumerable synths - these pads are instant film soundtrack. Next we enter the world of drum and percussive loops, again with a high degree of processing evident. Eric is obviously a fuzz box fan because fuzz gets everywhere, even on the drums, but it's all done so tastefully. Even the bell pads are severely weird though the soft bell pad on track 21 of the CD has vinyl noise all over it which I don't think adds to its usefulness.

There's a great section of drones that would see the Terminator films through the next three sequels. Also included in this section is are Indian drones which sound like samples of real Indian instruments that have been flanged and processed to the point of destruction. Next are the ambient drums which range from cavernous and spacey to industrial and tortured after which the fuzz box is given full rein to create more aggressive mayhem. The disc also contains a few obviously techno, ravey sounds, but most of the samples manage to avoid being categorized too rigorously; there are pulsating pads, loads of really good sci-fi noises and pads, filter sweeps, synthetic bass sounds and even a couple of synthetic choirs. The last track on the disc, Gothic Choirs is quite excellent, though for me, the real strength of this collection lies in its numerous evolving, textural sweeps.

It really is difficult to pigeonhole this disk other than to say that the overall coefficient of weirdness is significantly higher than average, but I have no hesitation in recommending this remarkable sample collection to anyone involved in soundtrack work, ambient techno music or honest to goodness New Age. It's also gratifying to see that most of the samples are relatively short and there are few that wouldn't fit into 8Mbytes of ROM.

Awarded the SOS five stars for weirdness above and beyond the call of duty.

-Paul White