Ueberschall Club Electro

As the name suggests, Club Electro takes a modern clubland sensibility and delivers it with a hint of ’80s-influenced electro. The material is organised into 28 construction kits, each of which is based around a single musical idea. Within each kit, a ‘demo’ loop illustrates how the individual loops might be arranged, while the other loops contain the usual range of layers, featuring drums, bass, synths and the occasional vocal. Individual drum hits are also provided. The layers themselves are plentiful, so, within the limitation of each construction kit’s basic musical pattern, there are plenty of possibilities for variation. The best way to think of these kits is as a single song section — and if you want further variation for something like a chorus/verse structure, you need to add some of your own elements, or find two construction kits that work together. Thankfully, the sounds, dominated as they are by big dance drums and analogue synths, are consistent enough across the collection to make the latter appproach straightforward. They’re also full of character, with lots of beefy synth tones.

Given that ’80s electro has been undergoing something of a revival, these loops ought to go down pretty well. They’re more obviously club orientated than the retro sounds of artists such as La Roux or Ladyhawke, and this is reflected in the very constrained, dance-friendly original tempos of between 128 and 130bpm. However, slow the kits down to the 95-105bpm range and things begin to sound more like Depeche Mode, Human League or Gary Numan — and there’s even one kit (‘Rush’) that put me in mind of Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’.

There’s no doubting the quality of what is presented here but, at this price I suspect that producers on a budget may be tempted to seek out slightly cheaper alternatives. Club Electro is, however, well worth checking out, and fits neatly into the growing range of electro-based titles in the Ueberschall range. John Walden