*********************************** AM/FM ***********************************  MUSIC DISK REVIEW: Title : Jesus on E's Producer : LSD 17bit no's : 2268a, 2268b No Disks : 2 No tracks : 1 (+ credits part) Musician : Echo Special Requirements : Two drives required. *********************************** AM/FM ***********************************  What's all this about then, one song, and it comes on two disks, that can't be correct ? Yes it is correct, but "Jesus on E's" isn't your normal music demo, it's a solid twenty-seven minute rave. "Oh no, not another rave disk", I hear you all cry. I was getting pretty bored myself with the seemingly endless stream of rave disks appearing everywhere, but this is different. Most rave music disks generally play a few 200-300k modules, which with the size of samples needed for rave doesn't allow much scope, leaving the songs usually sounding repetitive and dull. "Jesus on E's" solves this problem by loading a huge array of samples from disk whenever it needs them, and erases them from memory when it's finished with them. Composistion(s) : I'm not going to include the credits part music in this rating, it was average, but not relly part of the disks overall "experience". Describing a twenty-seven minute constantly changing rave tune is very difficult to do. Basically it's a mix of around twenty different rave records, with some original touches thrown in for good measure. I'm not going to list all the different songs this music was based on, anyone who is into rave will probably recognize them. What I will do is mention a few of LSDs original bits. The first music you'll hear is the peacefull melody from "Sentinel", off Mike Oldfields "Tubular Bells II". It's stays peaceful for about ten seconds, before being joined by a high speed breakbeat, and then gets totally wiped out by the powerful bass tracks. Another semi-original bit, was the use of some Rolf Harris samples, with various breakbeats, and all sorts of Ravy bits added. I say semi-original because some of the Rolf samples were used in the same way on "Stylophonia", by Two Little boys. Without doubt, my favourite part of the music was LSDs raved up version of "The Muppet Show" theme, very amusing. So what we've got here is'nt exactly 100% original, but it's certainly an original concept, and a very enjoyable twenty-seven minutes. Rating 7½ Samples : As I've mentioned, there's a huge amount of different samples used throught these disks. (The credits part lists where they were all sampled from) The quality was on the whole quite good, a few of the samples had some whistling, and white noise to them, but to be fair, this music didn't need perfect samples to be good. The best way to listen to it is to just turn your stereo up as far is it will go, and if you've got speakers like mine, you'll find they make a lot more noise than the samples ever will. Rating 7. Presentation : This is where "Jesus On E's" really excels. Just pop in the two disks, and expierience the incredible music and light show. There are so many flashy effects that these disks utilise; shade bobs, full-screen animations, equalisers, sprites, vectors, and loads of other things I don't know the name for. Everything is synched perfectly in time with the music, for example, as the bass drum bangs away, a variety of static full-screen pictures rapidly appear, and dissappear. Most of the times a vocal sample is played, the text also appears on-screen as the words are spoken. A nice touch. I've never seen anything, like this before, it's superb. Rating 10 AM/FM Rating : It all comes down to, "Do you like rave ?" If you don't, then this music is'nt going to magically convert you, and you'll probably hate it. If you like rave, or you just don't mind it, (much like myself) then get this disk, you'll be amazed. (even if it's for how LSD managed to squeze 2.3Mb of music, and 1.4Mb of graphics on two disks!). Rating 8 *********************************** AM/FM ***********************************