Lucky Dip - 1 track - The opening track is really the demo, giving a selection of the sorts of sounds you can expect to hear through the rest of the CD. (The samples aren't actually repeated though). There are 24 samples, breathing, screams, blips, a weird "round the twist" vocal a variety of odd sounding hits and 5 loops, the dog beat in particular making excellent use of a bark sound. Different.

Beat Loops - 10 tracks - The 60 loops are broken down by BPM, from a sedate 69.2 to a manic 207.4, the majority though are in the mainstream 90-120 BPM range. First things first, there is little here that sounds much like a "normal" kit at all. Though there are individual sounds that are recognisable their invariably mixed in with others that god only knows where they came from.

The loops pretty much uniformly are heavily processed, distortion, reverb, gating,delay, echo and compression all much in evidence, full sounding and very good indeed. Whilst generally not containing too many fill effects most of the loops contain some that pads the sound out, be it a bass, blip, scratch, scream, buzz, clanging or other percussive sound. It would certainly be difficult to hide many these loops in the back of a mix, a track very much would need to be based around the loop.

The loops vary in length from 2-8 bars and many have a nice evolution to them so that several loops can be extracted from the loop presented, some contain fills as well. There certainly is quite some variety of percussive sounds on offer, gun shots, stabs, orchestral and vocal, scrapes, distortion, breathy noises, guitar, whistling, static type noises, though in many cases its difficult to imagine what the original sounds were.

I'll describe a couple, Ghost Chatter Rhythm, one of the light sounding loops, light sounding kick , with a sort of mute scraping, rapid delayed clickish sound and a sort of vocal breathing chattering "dub, dub, dub" in the back ground. Glen Miller Door Knock Massacre is a sort of Art of Noise exercise, gun shots, very short stabs, horn sound, reversed bass drone in the background, excellent. Dirty Confined Singing Metal Trance Kit, is a regular kit effected out of recognition, pounding kick drum, crunchy beats, and distortion all around. Sounds a little muted, but judging by the name deliberate.

All in all an excellent collection of off beat loops, my only criticism would be that overall the sounds are just a touch muted, lacking real punchy sounds. I don't think many of the loops would cut through a mix, the loops would have to be the main focal point of a track and other sounds built up around them. Perhaps a little EQ or compression might be in order depending on your track.

Marc-Layton Bennet - 4 tracks - much more orthodox sounding loops here, from 59.9 to 134.4 BPM - almost sounding out of the place on this CD, though there is still a fair amount of processing that goes on, at least there is a recognisable kit underneath, with the addition of a bit of guitar and bass on a couple of the loops. Bit of a mix, from a slow jazz groove to a 75 second Jungle Message tom indulgence. Would have to say the weakest part of the CD.

Non Drum Grooves - 10 tracks - 50 loops that vary in BPM from 68.9 BPM to 214.9, most though are in the 70-110 range. Whilst the loops per se don't contain drums there are many percussive elements within the loops, and also generally being much simpler in structure than the Beat Loops. Many contain just the single theme, which makes them more suitable for layering with other sounds or samples. Most don't evolve though their duration, though a few do, and are quite short, a bar or two.

If the Beat Loops were a bit odd then at least they contained some recognisable elements, here the producers have used even more off beat sounds to produce the loops, and a very effective job they've done too. Clunks, coughs, quacks, saws, scrapes, machinery, fluttering sounds, stabs from Indian type music (?), jingles, vocal type sounds, reversed sounds even a cheesy fairground organ. Pretty much you think of it then there is something like it here.

Many of the loops would be ideal for layering with bass arpeggio type sequences to produce something different, under currents to a track, or an unusual intro or outro to a track. Tangerine Dream style bass runs spring to mind in particular.