5 STARS

I've often wondered how Eric Persing finds the time to produce so much high quality sample material, but at a recent NAMM show, I was let into his secret by his distributors at ILIO - apparently he has his sampler and computer set up at the end of his bed and he keeps working until he falls asleep. When he regains consciousness, he just sits up and carries on from where he left off. Every once in a while, somebody pushes a plate of food under the door - most of it goes uneaten!

Liquid Grooves sees Eric at his creative best as he blends manually played acoustic, ethnic and electronic drums sounds (and the odd sampled whale 'drum'), then subjects them to heavy processing using reverbs, delays, filters vocoders, and whatever else he can get his hands on. The result is a collection of slow to medium paced beats (some as slow as 52bpm), with a hugely atmospheric feel, and several versions of each groove are presented with different degrees of effect treatment or different levels of instrumentation.

Burning Grooves, reviewed recently, and Liquid Grooves are very different collections, with Burning Grooves concentrating on a live kit sound. Liquid Grooves, on the other hand, really is a masterpiece of layering, effecting and processing. Furthermore, the CD ROM version includes over 450 hits (including Wavedrums), that don't come with the CD only version. Eric says this is a plot to persuade us stubborn Brits into buying the CD ROM version! Personally, I think life is too short to sample from audio CDs anyway! By buying the CD-ROM version -which includes the Audio CD for quick referencing, all the elements of every full mix and remix are available individually to give the user maximum flexibility.

The Korg Wavedrum appears on numerous examples, as do clay drums and other exotic sounds. I think I also heard some Lexicon resonant filter programs ticking away in the background of some of the examples, though this may have been done with a vocoder - I really don't know for sure. Some examples have a pitched element to them, in which case the pitch is annotated along with the BPM, though versions of the same loops are also available with the pitched elements removed. Resonant delays are used in some places to create metallic or aboriginal drones, and some sounds have been treated with distortion to give them a contemporary edge. Most of the rhythms are fairly straightforward, in terms of time signature, making them musically useful, and virtually all of them spark of compositional ideas. A few more laid back rhythms would have been useful for old hippies like me, but given the breadth and quality of the material on offer here, I think Eric is long overdue for his full 5 points. He's currently locked away doing a four-disc Vocal set - I await it with anticipation having heard a few snatches at NAMM.

-Paul White