"....Bound to appeal... An army of whooshy, metallic, analogue, and other textures... Good weird atmospheres... Hits the mark squarely... This is good stuff..."

Now on to the competition where we find a very different animal. Clad in green and blue (therefore matching just about every object in my bedroom, including the mouse mats), with a probably very famous waterfall cascading down the cover, the title of the new Zero-G CD says it all: 'Ambient'. Hot on the heels of Orb's acclaimed UFO CD, this is bound to appeal. Textures abound, some windy, some watery, some just plain wacky. Trouble is: these tend to be memory intensive: modern synthesizers are capable of generating complex evolving soundscapes from a snippet of ROM: recording the same into a sampler can take up 100,000 times as much RAM! However, if you can only afford one expensive box then a sampler has to be first choice. Still, there are ways to extend the shelf life of some of these greedy samples: where filters sweep in and out try alternate direction looping. You may also lower sampling frequencies: many textures have lowish cut-offs.

Right now I'm admiring the ultrasonic sequences on track 20. Finger cymbals and New Age percussion follow. The first 19 tracks contain an army of whooshy, metallic, analogue and other textures, not unexpectedly. Track 25 has some lively hoots and whistles. 26 sports a thumb piano, multi-sampled, 27 onwards feature ethnic percussion - by this point I'm beginning to expect whales. Nicely understated bell trees and gongs are followed by a variety of shakers (by now we are on track 33). This is good stuff. On track 35 there are some real tooth clenchers. 36 has some shy prepared percussion sounds and 37 takes us outside the air lock.

By 38 we hit the nature trail, but a few samples later come chords and notes (and was that a whale?). The synth percussion of track 44 sounds tidy, less so the textures that precede it. 45 has some classic synth FX, though . 46 has three nice unpretentious waves and 47 has good, weird, atmospheres. The ambient FX are just asking for more ambience and FX to be applied to them. The following tracks have some excellent noises, though the description of them might seem a bit repetitive, as they're more synth atmospheres."