World Colours

Sound on Sound 12/95

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The Flamenco guitar is given a lot of coverage in form of grooves, chords and solo passages, and the sounds are richly recorded and full of authenticity. There`s plenty of variety and tons of atmosphere, with accompanying claps, steps, whoops and shouts: In short, more olé than you can shake a stick at. The Spanish guitars give way to a useful selection of jazz guitar and violin licks which, although not strictly ethnic, are a welcome inclusion just the same. The fun continues into the Romanian gipsy section, which is full to the brim with accordions, clarinets, violins, zimbalons and drums. The samples appear mostly as long musical phrases chopped up into smaller three or four-second sections. The recording quality overall varies from super-clean, dry studio recordings to music recorded on stage at he European gipsy music festival in 1994. In a couple of cases, this `live` sound gives some of the samples annoying amounts of background noise, such as claps and crowd ambience. This is particularly noticeable on some of the otherwise wonderful gipsy violin recordings, which in many cases, are so full of other audible instruments on the stage that they could hardly be called solo recordings at all. CD 2 is mainly dedicated to African sounds, and in particular drum samples. Mandinka ensembles, Djembes, Bata, Tama and Junjunba drums are all explored and beautifully recorded. There is fantastic depth to most of the samples, and plenty of scope both for editing the loops provided or constructing your own patterns using the single samples that appear at the end of each section. There is an unusual collection of flute and vocal samples, as well as African five-stringed guitars (plucked adn strummed), shouts and tribal-type atmospheres. Asia is represented towards the end of the CD by sort of mixed bag of odd drum, vocal and instrument samples, including a set of sitar licks. Finally no ethnic CD would be complete without at least one digeridoo track, and the few samples provided here as good as any I`ve yet heard. Conclusion: Split more or less into two halves (Gipsy and African) World Colours covers a huge number of ethic and world music styles. Review: World Colours  Sound on Sound 12/95The Flamenco guitar is given a lot of coverage in form of grooves, chords and solo passages, and the sounds are richly recorded and full of authenticity. There`s plenty of variety and tons of atmosphere, with accompanying claps, steps, whoops and shouts: In short, more olé than you can shake a stick at. The Spanish guitars give way to a useful selection of jazz guitar and violin licks which, although not strictly ethnic, are a welcome inclusion just the same. The fun continues into the Romanian gipsy section, which is full to the brim with accordions, clarinets, violins, zimbalons and drums. The samples appear mostly as long musical phrases chopped up into smaller three or four-second sections. The recording quality overall varies from super-clean, dry studio recordings to music recorded on stage at he European gipsy music festival in 1994. In a couple of cases, this `live` sound gives some of the samples annoying amounts of background noise, such as claps and crowd ambience. This is particularly noticeable on some of the otherwise wonderful gipsy violin recordings, which in many cases, are so full of other audible instruments on the stage that they could hardly be called solo recordings at all. CD 2 is mainly dedicated to African sounds, and in particular drum samples. Mandinka ensembles, Djembes, Bata, Tama and Junjunba drums are all explored and beautifully recorded. There is fantastic depth to most of the samples, and plenty of scope both for editing the loops provided or constructing your own patterns using the single samples that appear at the end of each section. There is an unusual collection of flute and vocal samples, as well as African five-stringed guitars (plucked adn strummed), shouts and tribal-type atmospheres. Asia is represented towards the end of the CD by sort of mixed bag of odd drum, vocal and instrument samples, including a set of sitar licks. Finally no ethnic CD would be complete without at least one digeridoo track, and the few samples provided here as good as any I`ve yet heard. Conclusion: Split more or less into two halves (Gipsy and African) World Colours covers a huge number of ethic and world music styles.