Gearwire

“Abstraction 03: Found Sound Club Edition Is Like The Results Of A Scavenger Hunt! With the economy in such wretched shape, it's important that we stop importing sounds in from sound producing nations like "Saudio Arabia" and "Turn It Up To Elevenezuela" and start using our own untapped resources -- find sound domestically, so to speak. Galbanum Abstraction 03: Found Sound Club Edition is a sample library that, if implemented, will do all that for $39.95 for a single format and $14.95 for each additional format, meaning it won't be too much of a dent on your deficit.”

Remix Magazine 07/2008

“The Abstraction 02 loops are a master class in stutter theory and glitch-music sound design. Ranging from edgy circuit bends and resonant distortions to clangorous metallic tones infused with kinky subwobbles and ear-piercing blips, about half of the loops are abstract mood elements while the rest are glitched-out synthetic drum phrases. All loops are two or four measures long, provided without kick/snare/hat (so you can add your own later) and stretch flawlessly over a wide tempo range due to their highly rhythmic nature. I like that everything is completely dry, allowing you to arrange, and custom slice and chop them without worrying about reverb or delay trails. That also creates a greater coherence between all loops and makes dropping in single hits as augmentation a piece of cake. Abstraction 02 is a gold mine of posh electro-organic grooves and deviant soundscapes that defy labeling and should serve as ample inspiration for any future electronic or urban style.”

Beat Magazine, DE 07/2008

“Abstraction 02: 5 Stars and Editor's Choice award!” (Read PDF)

“I have to say... I REALLY like your sampling and sound design sensibilities. I got this stuff late at night but I can already see that your sounds are profoundly inspiring for me. Something to help me jump start my creative processes. I'm bowled over by the amount of rx2 loops that came with each Abstraction package. True playgrounds of sound. Same goes for, incidentally, your Rapture product. I love it...and barely scratched the thinnest fraction of the surface.”

“Well, as I'm already writing, I want to take the opportunity to thank you for your work so far, it seems you always put a lot of thought and precision in it. The Abstraction Loops integrate nicely into Spectrasonics Stylus RMX, and your Piscis Soundset for Rapture is really outstanding. Looking forward for what's to come in your product line.”

Come back for seconds and unleash total havoc in the club by pairing the tiara of the TR-Era, with random pseudo-organic futurism.

"Abstraction 04: Found Sound Urban Intelligence" is our copious double-dipped follow-up to our widely successful Abstraction 03 product. LIke it's predecessor, Abstraction 04 is once again an all-you-can-eat buffet of domestic "found sound", which has been purposefully polished, refined, and formated into rhythmic loop adders designed to spice up your percussive pallet and inject freshness into your grooves. This time around however, it is targeted directly at down tempo breaks, centrally-Intelligent hip-hop, and experimental urban futurism. Furthermore, this massive second helping of glitch rhythms and real-world sampled eccentricism, is for the first time paired together with analog kick and snare loops to synergistically co-create some seriously freaky future funk designed to make 3008 look old-school.

All Abstraction 04 loop content is produced at a native tempo of 106 BPM and is designed to effortlessly stretch from 90BPM to 120BPM and beyond to fit all tempo ranges used in current urban and down-tempo breaks music sub-genres. Abstraction 04 is particularly suitable for:

• Experimental Hip Hop, Trip Hop, Glitch Hop, and Dub Step
• Breaks, Electronica, IDM, and Abstract Rock
• Ambient, Chill Out, Downtempo, and Left Field
• Film Scoring, Game Development, and Sound FX
• and any other cross-genre music style that borrows from these influences

The Abstraction Sample Line is a downloadable series of ultramodern samples, loops, hits, and construction kits provided in industry standard formats including Apple Loops, Acid Loops, REX2, AIFF, and WAV.

• Both Mix and Solo Element loops are provided. In total, four different loop types are available: Dry Solo Kick Loops, Dry Solo Snare Loops, Dry Abstraction Percussion Loops, and Mixed loops in which these elements are combined, mixed, and mastered.

• All solo element loops are provided without additional auxiliary Reverb or delay effects. This keeps the loops pristinely clean and sharp, enables easy custom slicing and editing, and allows send effects to be added as needed at the mix stage by the producer to perfectly suit the needs of the given project. For example, it is possible to keep the Kick dry and punchy and route the Perc and the Snare each to a different Reverb using send-busses. The result is more flexibility and better coherence between the loops and the other elements of the project.

• Solo element loops may imported on separate tracks in the sequencer project and easily be matched by name and to exactly recreate the provided mix loops while allowing flexibility in the arrangement needs of the project. Solo elements may thus be independently mixed, processed, or muted at various points in the arrangement.

• Solo elements may be combined in different ways to create hybrid mutations and build completely new loops made by combining the separate elements in different ways. For example mix Kick_001 with Snare_063, and Perc_A117. Over 6 million simple combinations are possible!

• All percussion samples are made in stereo and make use of extreme spatial processing techniques at the sample level to produce sounds that literally jump out of the speakers. This produces loops which are very active spatially while keeping perfect silence in-between hits when desired. The result is loops that can cut and punch through even dense mixes without taking up huge amounts of mix space.

It began in Africa. Dr. TR-Analog is your guide on this safari through the jungles and grasslands of the ancient-future world of Found-Sound. Poly-rhythmic perturbations and nano-organic chaos constructs channel the spirit of the Mbira, invoke the antediluvian rites of the witch-doctor trance ceremony, and supplant these venerable visions with post-modern urban reincarnations. Transmuted ethnomusicology and club-ready analog grooves interbreed and spawn a new synthesis of composite contrarian bliss, where modern talking drums recite soliloquies that compete with Shakespeare in their metaphorical eloquence.

The Abstraction 04 production process follows where our widely popular Abstraction 03 product left off. We start with the Single Hit samples from Abstraction 03 and use them to build hundreds of brand new loops which are targeted directly at urban and down-tempo music. Then we pair each of these performances with a custom analog Kick loop and a Snare loop which are both composed to synergistically work with the matching percussion groove. These elements are offered as separate loops to enable easy remixing. Finally we mix all elements together, apply some of the award-winning 2CAudio Aether reverb to the various parts, and use precision compressors and mastering tools to glue the elements into a seamless, club-conquering composite mix loop.

Electronic musicians, artists, producers, DJs, scoring professionals, multi-media developers, and synthesis/sound-design enthusiasts of all experience levels who are looking for an easy way to escape the sonic banality of the overpopulated "me-too" market and embrace the unexpected will find this collection an invaluable coup de theatre. Anyone looking for a new way to tip the balance between musical predictability and surprise will find it here in this yard-sale cornucopia of pseudo-organic oddities, fresh vine-ripened polyrhythms, and random object obscurity.

Andrew Souter, founder of Galbanum and co-founder of 2CAudio, is a world renowned sound-designer, developer, mastering engineer, music producer, composer, and artist. He has worked closely with companies like Native Instruments, Apple, Cakewallk, MOTU, Steinberg, U&I Software, Waves, Sound Toys, Camel Audio, Prosoniq, FAW and many others. He has worked with leading artists such as Sasha. He was worked with record labels such as Paul Oakenfold's Perfecto Records. He has worked with film companies such as Centropolis Entertainment. He has scored major global TV ad campaigns for clients including Discovery Channel, History Channel, and TLC. Galbanum products reflect his diverse experiences and strive always to balance industry leading technical excellence with a connection to, and expansion of, the human condition.