GROOVACIOUSNESS: 5 Stars

SELECTION: 5 Stars

BANG FOR THE BUCK: 5 Stars



To oversimplify, jungle is a style of dance music characterized by extremely fast drum patterns set into swirling, sexy pads, often with bass lines at half the tempo of the drums. The interesting thing about how drums are used in this style is that they hardly function as timekeepers at all; they add an energetic overdrive to a pulse laid down by a com bination of bass and percussion sounds. Since this is a dance remix style, quotations are com monplace, and pristine sound quality is not a concern. Drum loops are rarely used for their entire length, and often they are retriggered or obliterated with DSP just as you begin to recog nize what you're hearing. It's a spacey, trance-inducing style.



Jungle Warfare from Zero-G is filled to the gills with just about everything you'd need to crank this stuff out in mass quan tities. The first nine tracks (44 loops) are programmed loops of 32 bars or more, which means that there's room for a substan tial number of alterations and variations in the basic material. Although they certainly keep the tempo going, many have rhyth mic sub-loops that create synco pations. Others stop abruptly and stutter off into nothing, only to slam back in a bar or so later. The loops range from scratchy recordings of acoustic kits to clean drum machine beats.



Another aspect of remixes is that drum sounds are not neccs sarily called on to anchor the hottom of the frequcncy spec trum: Otten a loop will have the bass rollcd completely off, leav ing just the scratchy high end. Zero G has this covered; yuu'll find a variety of loops with dras tic EQ settings.



To rull your own drums, so to speak, the disc offers over 150 "straight" loops of four bars each. Some of these are indeed four bars long, others arc two or one-bar loops. Again, we found a wide variety of kits, beats, and EQ settings, as well as an energy level that would exhaust entire clubfuls of dancers if the loups were played end to end.



Unable to wait until the end of the disc to start working, we whipped up some tracks with some straight loops on our favorite digital audio and MIDI sequencing packagc. The loops are indicated as having a tempo of 160 bpm, so we set the metronome accordingly. When we tried to sync up MIDI ttacks, we found that 160 bpm is an approximation; many loops drifted either ahead or behind the beat, even within the course of four bars. One loop even caused GR to exclaim, "Man, that rushes like crazy!"



If you approach this disc ex pecting a collection of air-tight loops that you can use to build a drum track for your pop tunes, you may be disappointed. To use this collechon in a traditional tunc, you'll have a lot of work ahead of you stretchillg and trim ming loops to lit your tempo. But that's not what jungle is ahout. Heck, some mixes we've heard such as "Travels the Road" from UK remixers X Project, start and stop loops almost without re gard to the groove. Other remix artists, such as Metalhead, use just enough of a loop to add that frenetic energy, and then drop it out, make it stutter, or put a monstrous delay on it. It's rare that you hear a loop played for four entire bars.



What you will hear is a lot of analog beeps, boops, and sweeps, as well as pads of all types, processed like crazy. Jungle Waffare has a nice selection of these hasic materials, too. Among the 50 or so pads, you'll find many atmospheric effects, vox-ish sounds, sweeps, sus chords, minor 7ths, 9th chords, and icy textures. Even the oblig atory Korg M1 Pole and Lore. The Rhodes samples sound like they were taken from a Stage model with stereo tremolo: very sexy. A deep, resonant gamelan gong is provided; I've heard this type of sample used as a bass sound or as a pad. Fidelity ranges from scratchy LP to di rect-from-the-synth, and while some samples decay, others are abruptly cut off. GR also notes, "Cool use of EQ and effects pro cessing. Love those delays at the end of certain loop passages."



The disc has several tracks for constructing your own drum ki~s. These include a good vari ety of the basics, but also brief percussion loops that would be great to use on top of the regu lar loops. TR-808 and Juno basses are represented by a few tracks of single notes, wobbles, growls, and sweeps. Not exactly multisampling, but in the jungle, they leam to make the most of what they have.



As you'd expect, many jun gle remix artists make good use of screams, wails, and a variety of other sound effects; Zero-G has provided a good selection of these as well. Vo cal effects include a number of samples of Jamaican origin for that reggae touch.



Jungle is an exciting and in novative style in which musical sounds and their functions are being re-invented. From what we've heard, Jungle Warfare gives you just about everything you need to survive in the remix rain forest.