Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ 5/5 Stars
Vessels is a 26GB sound library for Kontakt (v7.72 or later, full version or free Player) and follows Noon Instruments’ moody and atmospheric Toska.
Recorded at Holy Mountain Studios in Hackney, London, it presents a broad range of hardware synth‑based timbres in adjustable blends of clean captures alongside variously patinated and ‘distressed’ re‑amped and re‑recorded versions of those same sounds. Across three banks (called Convergent, Divergent, and Relics) the synths are played through an oil drum and thundersheet, guitar amps, fed into a Korg MS‑20 and various effects pedals, and also recorded to tape. The same 220 instrument presets (divided into Arp, Atmosphere, Keys, Pad and Pulse categories) make up Convergent and Divergent, but have different treatments. Relics has just 20 more heavily processed patches.
Getting right to it, to my ear Vessels is a rare and wonderful meeting of timbral complexity and straightforward musical potential, with many sounds having real depth and character but also a sort of wide‑open generic quality. There’s a distinct lack of cheesy or novelty sounds, or anything aligned with particular stylistic genres. Instead you get an understated, moody coolness, with occasional deliberate naïvety: a neo‑analogue character (you might say) that works beautifully for structural beds and textures rather than goofily drawing attention to itself. I was frequently reminded of certain veins of grown‑up electronica: Ultraísta, Boards Of Canada, Arovane and others. And hence there’s a lot that should be an instant fit for suspenseful, dark and dramatic music for picture.
Happily, too, Vessels is no mere preset player. The compact, minimalist interface hides it, but there’s an extensive synth and effects architecture built in, with dual low‑/high‑pass filters, twin ADSRs, and a pair of LFOs with multiple modulation destinations. A dedicated distortion section and a convolution reverb with some excellent, unique impulses feels very much part of the synth engine. Crisp decaying plucks can quickly become ominous drones, and vice versa.
There are a few quirks, such as no user control of velocity sensitivity: some presets respond, and others don’t. There’s no aftertouch response at all (so forget MPE...) but the mod wheel controls level at all times. Another slight bother for me were the many presets that loaded with harmony voices sounding below the played note: unusual and inspiring sometimes, but on the whole less compositionally useful than those that sound above, like partials. A few presets were a sniff out of tune, or at the wrong basic pitch, and when editing some patches I often missed a filter tracking parameter. Also, with its multiple layers, Vessels can consume a chunk of CPU, and muting layers does not reduce the voice count, sadly.
It’s one of those sound libraries where almost every preset could launch a creative journey, while offering the flexibility to quickly adapt to specific needs.
However, none of this really diminished Vessels’ countless delights. It’s one of those sound libraries in which almost every preset could launch a creative journey, while offering the flexibility to quickly adapt to specific needs. For composers it’ll provide instant, subtle atmosphere, and for music producers a range of unique timbres that are immediately playable, engaging, and soulful. Hugely inspiring.