"It is an ideal CD for anyone into Bhangra or world music"

Awarded 8 out of 10

"This may not be the tastiest of names, but it sums up perfectly what this Indian-flavoured disc has to offer. You get around 60 tracks with plenty of loop variations and a stack of styles that should benefit all but the most esoteric musical genre. The first batch of loops paves the way for the CD's format: sets of rhythms based around a 'kit' of traditional Indian percussive sounds. They're clearly and crisply recorded, and each can easily be incorporated into a piece of your own as the main rhytmic hook.

The ensemble loops are perhaps the most flexible on the disc; they can be used as dramatic background rhythms or layered together to produce some massive percussive build ups. There are also plenty of less complicated loops on the disc, featuring just one instrumental sound, so that you can experiment and construct your own complete rhythms. The vintage Masala section is where the ideas really start a-flowin', with more variation in sound and a greater rawness to the samples. It's the beginning of a section of samples that can be used for anything from special effects to the main ingredient of a song.

A tempo is given with each loop but, as the sleeve notes point out, some loops may have been cut to make them more comprehensible to western ears, or else the tempo is only given as a guideline. In practice, this means that you may have to work just that bit harder with your time signatures and tempos when empoying some of the samples.

It's not all loops on VindaLoops - there are plenty of single, percussive hits, vocals and drum machine programs incorporating an ethnic style. It is an ideal CD for anyone into Bhangra or world music, and techno heads wanting to move away from four-on-the-floor tedium into more exotic climes will love it."