Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ 5/5 Stars
The French horn as source material for an ambient library seems unusual, but as Emergence Audio’s excellent new release Obsidian Brass proves, we haven’t quite reached the limits of what can be turned into a textural, atmospheric, cinematic soundscape.
When you think about it, the horn is a bit of a shapeshifter: played on hunts in the days of yore; moving to a more formal, indoor setting in concert bands; adding drama to symphony orchestras; making the leap to jazz ensembles in the 20th Century; and now, to otherworldly sonic realms enabled by technology. It has a distinctive core sound but also the ability to convey a diverse range of emotions, and that may explain its versatility, which is on full display here in Obsidian Brass.
The source material features a staggering number of pristinely recorded articulations: movement by way of a flutter, double and triple tongue, lip trills, vibrato, hand bends, and whole‑ and half‑step grace notes; the sharp attack of the sforzandos; the clear, ringing call of a sustained open note; dynamic heft of a sustained swell; and the playful (and onomatopoeically named) ‘twah twah’. These provide fertile ground for all the effects that follow.
First draft sketches lend themselves to designing tense, brooding and dramatic pieces; dig a little deeper and other possibilities begin to reveal themselves. Lush pads bathed in digital textures evoke nostalgic Hollywood by way of Vangelis. The trailer music trend of reimagining pop songs as harmonically rich mood pieces is the perfect playground for the combination of sounds found in this library. There’s even a possibility for a broad comedy cue with a rapidly descending scale run on the Here It Comes preset. The music‑for‑picture crowd aren’t the only ones served by this Kontakt instrument. Fire up one of the Pulses presets for the rhythmic side of Obsidian Brass to emerge, and you have the building blocks of a dance track in the vein of Underworld or Moby.
As you explore the long evolving soundscapes enabled by Emergence Audio’s Infinite Motion Engine 2.0 technology, there’s one point to note: watch out for the build up of low frequencies in your compositions, especially prevalent in this library built upon the warm, velvety sounds of the French horn. The sounds are so lush and rich that once you start layering, it takes no time to use up your low‑end allocation so things can get muddy if you’re not mixing as you go.
Obsidian Brass is cinematic, vivid, energetic, and lush. Highly recommended.
Emergence Audio’s GUI is so functional and seamless it becomes invisible, allowing the composer to focus, without interruption, on the creative. The sounds and the possibilities for their manipulation are at the forefront of each of their releases, and this one is no exception. The Multis deserve a special shoutout for loading without fuss and being light on CPU usage as you play. You’ll find a lot of space‑related names like Star, Nebula, Infinite, Universe, and Matter scattered across the library, but it offers more earthly sonic possibilities as well. Obsidian Brass is cinematic, vivid, energetic, and lush. Highly recommended.