I really want to move to Sweden, with its tall, pretty girls; long, cold winters; and e-Lab kicking out sick beat libraries all the time. Ballistix is the most recent e-Lab offering to enter my CD-ROM drive, and like their last release, which concentrated on house sounds, it takes a popular and familiar style and puts just enough of a spin on it to keep things interesting. The Ballistix style is hard-hitting, aggressive, distorted electronica, and draws inspirations from hop-hop, house and uptempo good-time club music.



The Ballistix package contains two CDs--an audio CD for quick auditioning of samples and for playing into a hardware sampler or looper, and a CD-ROM with these same loops and sounds encoded as Acidized WAV files. I tried the loops and sounds out using Cubase and Live. Everything worked perfectly, and Live even picked up the tempo information from the WAV files. The Loops and sounds on Ballistix are all at either 135 or 140 bpm, and are as tight as J.Lo's pants. The individual drum samples are edgy and decidedly processed. As programmed, the loops and demos are quite remarkable; like the e-Lab house collection, the programming is good enough to learn a few lessons. I heard just this kind of music from a DJ recently, and a song based on the Ballistix loops would have melded seamlessly into a set of commercially released dance tracks. Ballistix also includes a ton of tripped-out, delayed, and filtered melodic sounds, including synths, keyboards, processed vocals, and general noisiness. Every WAV file was perfectly clipped, and the audio CD included a final downbeat on each loop for editing reference.



If you are at all interested in this style of music, Ballistix is worth every penny. Nobody attacks a style quite like e-Lab. Those guys know the material, make great sounds, and did a flawless job of preparing the CD.