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review 2008-07-17

Trafik gets 5 Stars from SOS!

Trafik are the electronica duo Andrew Archer and John Elliot, on the Global Underground label, and when they’re not hobnobbing with the dance aristocracy they’re releasing mix albums and remixes in droves, and underscoring for CSI and various Playstation games. Their eponymous sample library forms part of Loopmasters’ new Artist Series, which aims to provide bleeding-edge sounds with an unassailable pedigree. If you’re suspicious that people with this kind of profile might just be cashing in with a bunch of second-rate material scraped from some dusty corner of an old hard drive, then let me lay your fears to rest – there’s no doubt that Trafik are firing the big guns here.

More than 120 loops are offered in three main folders: Drums, Bass and Music. In the first of these, the all-important kick drums are characterised by a concrete-solid low end, setting a hard-nosed tone far from the ‘poke you in the eye’ mid-range click cliché of the plastic chart-surfers. The programming is as inventive as the ‘progressive’ subtitle implies, but with an infectious groove and lots of hairily mutated percussion sustains.

Characterful effects are frequently on show as well, but these guys shrewdly keep their funky delays and distortions from obscuring the kind of chunky bone structure that wears even complicated arrangements lightly. What’s really knock-out, though, is the programming dynamics, which supply ample sucky side-chain madness without giving away any transient wallop – this is partly expert use of reversed snippets and twisted ambiences, and is a real tour de force.

The bass loops are also enormously satisfying, reminding me pleasantly at times of the Chemical Brothers’ ‘Private Psychedelic Reel’. Vying with the drum programming for rhythmic bounce, these pile on the oscillators and distortion, and periodically rearrange small items of your furniture, much as you’d hope. The synth riffs and chordal patterns of the Music Loops folder, on the other hand, don’t uniformly demand the same level of attention as the drums and basses, despite fine sonics and the odd ‘how the hell did the do that?’ moment tucked in to reward the conscientious browser.

On top of all this, there’s a set of folders with one-shots and two-note/octave multisamples to fit in with and supplement the loop material. There are some diamonds to be mined here, and churning through the raw one-shots also underlines how much talent Trafik have brought to bear in transforming them into living, breathing, pulsating beats.

One niggle: I found the ‘featuring 1.2GB of materials’ on the back of the pack a bit cheeky, when you actually only seem to get about 400MB duplicated across the (admittedly numerous) different sampler formats. However, had this collection even been a standard £70 job here in the UK I’d probably still have been obliged to give it five stars for sheer quality. At half that price though, Christmas has arrived early for anyone wanting an injection of intelligence, danceability, and magic for their chosen flavour of IDM.

Rating: 5 stars

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Trafik gets 5 Stars from SOS!

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