Summary - Audio quality is exceptional, very clear and sharp, with just a hint of noise on the Guitar and Rhodes sections, but in no way affects the suability and when layered with any other sounds would be lost. Overall a very crisp production. There are a fair amount of effects applied to some sections of the sounds, especially the loops, which produces a variety of interesting sounds, but may not be to everyone's taste.

For anyone looking to make music in a "Bristol", trip hop kind of vein then this is an essential purchase, there are a whole range of excellent loops backed up with lots of very usable sounds. The twisted loops and the string sections are the pick of the CD and are truly excellent, I can't recall hearing a better string sound selection on any other sample CD. Perhaps the only weak part of the CD is the "synth" type sounds, and as they are only maybe 5% of the total sounds its nothing much to worry about.

It's obvious that there is a lot of very clever and thorough work involved here, whilst the range of sounds overall isn't that wide there is a lot of variety and originality in the way they are presented. So if your looking for the kind of sounds that are offered you should be able to find a variation that suits your track and taste. Perhaps the thought that struck me was how usable the sounds are, there were probably only a handful of samples that I thought, nice sound, but how could it actually be used.

As a construction set type CD then Twisted City certainly succeeds in its aim, all the elements are here to put together a very sound track, though as with any offering of this type you'd be looking to add elements from other sources to introduce originality, but the building blocks are all here. Additionally as a library CD this will also find a lot of use, even if the processed live loops don't appeal to your genre of music, the strings, bass, Leslie, scratch and Rhodes section all provide a very solid and usable collection of sounds.

It's difficult really to find anything negative to write about Twisted City, and the good news is that there is more work to come from these guys in 1999 !

Overall - Excellent sample CD that works well as either a construction set or as an addition to a sample library - 9/10.

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