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Hip hop then is not what hip hop is today. Not by far. At that time, hip hop was as much movement as music. It was an attitude. Not this cynically designed, stereotypical, mass-targeted rubbish we hear on the radio today.
Just pull up any old record by Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five, Mantronix, Run DMC or Stetsasonic. They're still working more than twenty years on.

I say it again. Hip hop was all about attitude, during the hard commercialisation of music in the late nineties the hip hop got hit hard.
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By this reason it was a huge surprise to see that old sampling gurus Coldcut teamed up with Loopmasters to create a sample library.
Coldcut needs no introduction. Their remix of Paid in Full made sure of that.

Sound Science is a sampling library that takes us back to the earliest days of sample cds when artists and producers sold their collections of favourite sounds. Compared with the ultra-focused sample libraries we have today (you know... 4 GB construction kits for making NuGabber-Rotterdam-Connoisseur-Style), these sample cds usually were a huge mish mash of sounds. Pianos, funk basses, pre-rave era bleeps and noises, stabs lifted from various records etc. As long as it rubbed your kettle it went into the collection.

Coldcut Science is exactly like that. It's totally impossible to classify it as hiphop, funk or rock. It's everything at the same time, which in a weird sense makes it feel fresh.

Neatly organized
The library is made in collaboration with Loopmasters which means that everything is very well organized. All samples are neatly divided into loops and single shots, and everything is mapped up with root key and tempo. In addion, the library comes in almost every format you can imagine. Reason Refill, Ableton Live Pack, Kontakt, Rex, Acid Wav - you name it.

If you are used to gigabyte sized libraries that gives you hundreds och kick drums, snares, loops - Sound Science might come as a shock. By standard of today, this library is small.

Some 500 sounds
All in all Sound Science contains a little over 500 samples. 166 samples in the one shot category and the remaing 351 samples are loops. The loops are divided into four main tempos: 70, 88, 100 and 133 BPM. Most of the loops are drums and on offer is a huge mix of acoustic drums, snappy TR-style electronic beats, percussion and odd synthetic percussion. Words like groovy and funky are so overused that they since long lost their meaning. But let me say it like this. I didn't wait long before I ripped the groove with the groove mapping tool in Live 8. If I would have found the famous drums from Soul Searchers I would not have been surprised (head over to YouTube - 3:31 you recognize the drums?).
Now, in the late 2009, ripping other bands loops are no longer the fashion, but Coldcut still keeps the right feeling.

Sound and loop wise - Coldcut have a penchant for acoustic basses. In the single sound category there are six acoustic bass sounds (five plucked and one bowed) out of a total of eight(!) sounds.

Another part that hugely impressed me was the vocal clips. In general, vocals samples are the most boring thing you can find. Just fire up your average House sample library and listen to all those 'Oooh', 'Yeah baby' and 'You take me higher'. Instant sleeping pills.
Not so with Sound Science. Here we got jazzy choirs and cweirdishly cool vocal cuts such as 'Let's just use a sample'. The only complaint here is that you want more. Much more.

Conclusion
The only flaw with Sound Science is that it's a small library. Although you probably could create a few songs based on only the material, you would quickly run out of ideas. No - Sound Science comes to its full right when used as a spice to bring something new and unexpected into your music. It's like someone compiled the best moments from the eighties and distilled it into a sample cd.
The material in Sound Science feels genuinely fresh, and although Sound Science ends way too quickly - I'm not hesitating one second to recommend this one. Total inspiration.