MINI REVIEWS

£249

Web spitfireaudio.com

Format PC/Mac, Kontakt/Kontakt Player

The fourth collaboration between lauded Icelandic composer and musician Ólafur Arnalds and Brit sampleware giants Spitfire Audio is a Kontakt Player engine based on Arnalds’ selfdeveloped software, which triggers rhythmic note patterns on two identical self-playing pianos using “sophisticated MIDI algorithms”. The pianos themselves – plus his Korg PS-3100 and Roland Juno-60 synths – have been captured in 15GB of recorded performances, curated by the man himself.

The headline acts are the eight Stratus instruments – four piano-based, four synthbased – but you also get a collection of supplementary NKIs that put various heavily processed “Warped” versions of the main sounds at your fingertips in the simple and intuitive Mercury interface. The Stratus engine centres on an 8x8 grid that enables assignment of particular loops and patterns to voices, so each consecutive held note, for example, triggers the selected pattern on the he next row in the series (the complexity of the patterns in each column is indicated by icons at the e top) at the played pitch. Each of the e 64 ‘coordinates’ contains up to five e pattern variations, and real-time movement through patterns and variations is a key feature, brilliantly tly facilitated with the ‘Evolve over time’ me’ and ‘Randomise over time’ functions. ons.

Sound shaping controls are basic sic – Attack, Release, the stereo imaging ng of the two pianos, and the volume and panning of an added single-note ote piano layer, for emphasis of the triggering notes – but a handful of effects prove useful, and the point here is the quality and tonality of the he underlying recordings anyway, so that’s not an n issue.

As anyone familiar with Arnalds’ s’ work will expect, Stratus is all about the kinds ds of wistful, percolating piano-based textures, ambiences bi and evocations for which he’s known. And while it could be described as a one-trick pony with a decidedly idiosyncratic sound, that trick is very cleverly and effectively implemented – and endless in its permutations – and the sounds it makes k are truly l sublime. bli

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