Contact: Sony, www.sonycreativesoftware.com
Format: CD-ROM with 262 Acidized WAV files (606MB); 16-bit/44.1kHz
Price: $39.95 list

You’re scoring a documentary on the Discovery Channel called Spectral Hauntings: Tower of London. Or maybe the scene in a horror flick where the detective, accompanied by the obligatory Disposable Blonde Teenage Cutie, opens the crypt and finds . . . ohmigod! Or maybe today’s gig is a PBS show titled The Lost Mayan Cities of Guatemala. For all of these, you’ll find the atmospherics you’ll need on Loop Noir, which is without a doubt one of the more unusual sample CD collections to come across my desk in quite some time.

This is not a beat-oriented collection, although within the 15 construction kits, there are some files with rhythmic elements. Rather, there are long pads, swooshing scary sounds, electronic nibblings, little glittering sounds with decays, killer drones, and other weirdnesses. Each construction kit also comes with an Acid file (ACID Xpress is included for playback) that demonstrates what the sounds can do, as well as serves as a point of departure for compositions.

Not all of these loops are of necessity locked to scary contexts. Some of them fall squarely under the “haunting beauty” classification, and would be highly suitable elements to add atmospherics to new age-type music or create useful transitions and overlays for trance music and other electronica. But at heart, this collection is all about the world that lies beyond the doors of perception . . . and it’s a strange, evocative world indeed.