Steve Sampling: The Optimist - The Reykjavik Grapevine

Published May 30, 2011

Steve Sampling’s trip-tastic journey through his magical adventure world of drum patterns, random delay effects, airtight compression and—you guessed it—oodles upon oodles of samples is light, accessible and enjoyable, which isn’t necessarily a good thing, mind you. The album gets a bit too ‘easy listening’ sometimes, with ‘Distorted Contact’ sounding like something you might hear in a vegan coffee shop. But for the most part it remains tacitly elusive, wafting through the air like the cloud of bong smoke it was presumably composed to.