it's all good…
Archive for the '1990s' Category
10th February, 2009 | 150 views
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I remember the Morales remix of Love’s Got Me get heavy rotation on Kiss 100 back in the day and I always preferred that version to the original but tucked away on the flip side of all the various releases of the single, was this smoky late nite groove. The low funky bass and percussion with a gentle caressing touch of reverb make for good soul vibration.
Play it on your radio,
Let the vibes flow through…
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1st February, 2009 | 83 views
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Dream house, ambient house – descriptions that were thrown about at the beginning of the nineties but correctly applied to this track that came nestled amongst others of similar ilk on the seminal compilation by DFC, which also had these sleeve notes:
Emotional, meditational, hypnotic are the words used to describe this new lymph of music that is conquering the dance scene. Here you can listen to a revolutionary new form of dance music that mixes atmospheric sounds of new age and ambient music with pulsating house beats. It’s simply called ambient house.
This is a really innovative way to make music, a new method of dance with the mood to create your own mental pictures. Mixing sound effects of new age, house beats and dreamy synthesiser melodies can create a music with a cantering repetitive groove to explore a completely new territory on the dance floor. Now you can dance with your body while you are dreaming with your mind. If house music has been quite an earthquake, ambient house, starting with Sueño Latino by Sueño Latino, is a warm, entangling and sweet shock.
This album is the first ambient house collection and DFC Team compiled it to explore some of the possibilities of this new trend. The tracks in this album are not made to be all commercial hits, but using Aqua Regia’s words we can say “in your hearts, not the charts”.
The ‘new trend’ seemed to peter out rather soon however which was unfortunate, there doesn’t appear to be any other compilations, not even a K-Tel one, of ambient house. Be advised that the pressing on the compilation isn’t great and some of the tracks have been edited in order to fit them all on one piece of vinyl – if you’re able to indulge yourself, hunt down and procure the tracks in their original form.
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11th January, 2009 | 64 views
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Sunday – a day of rest, contemplation and reflection from the travails of the week just passed and planning for the week ahead. The Belle Of Atlantis, weighing in at over ten minutes long, affords you some opportunity to do that; perhaps even take a micro nap for the more mature listener. Brought to my attention by one of the mixes that Bruce Bickerton put up on his website and have since also heard him play on his wonderfully eclectic radio show that I’ve unfortunately fallen out of the habit of listening to of late. This is an astoundingly beautiful track that fully deserves it’s extended playing time and is but one track from a double album of ambient material that is worth time and effort to acquire. Put your feet up, close your eyes and let your mind’s eye journey to the legendary city, summoned by her call.
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10th January, 2009 | 82 views
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Hooray it’s Saturday but boo, it’s January. Thus you’re probably unlikely to be on your way out this evening for a night of trance-induced debauchery amongst towering speaker stacks in a darkened room illuminated by nothing more than a distant laser through a haze of smoke; but if you were, the Xylem Flow Mix by Spooky would aid the trip. Unusual track in that when you first hear it, bass is conspicuous by it’s absence and it sounds like you’re listening to a track where the DJ has EQ’ed the bass out and forgotten about it, yet that just sweetens the moment when it finally arrives. Most people would probably have first encountered this pulsing little number on Northern Exposure, unless you were fortunate enough to be swept away on a throbbing dancefloor first.
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9th January, 2009 | 101 views
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The acronym, if you didn’t know or were wondering, stands for the Larry Heard Appreciation Society. However this isn’t a narcissistic project by the man himself but does naming your outfit after him live up to the self-enforced benchmark of quality that his title sets out? In the hands of Jamie Read, yes it does! This is the first of two EPs on his own label, Push II Shove Records, under the same moniker, both doing a more than decent stab at sounding Heard-esque. This track has it all – the smoothness of the keyboard chords and an acid line that “makes u want 2 jack”, sort of like Washing Machine put in a errr… washing machine with Stars or something.
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25th November, 2008 | 172 views
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Continuing with the Aphex Twin, his own work this time. My favourite track from Selected Ambient Works 85-92; the spongy, slightly squelchy bass and the sample of Gene Wilder from Charlie And The Chocolate Factory.
We are the music makers
And we are the dreamers of dreams
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24th November, 2008 | 92 views
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Ease into Monday with the Aphex Twin Care Mix of Journey by The Gentle People. Hopefully the below mantra doesn’t describe your day in the office, as you stare listlessly into space with a Thousand-yard Stare working for The Man but instead offers a time-out inside your head. I’m a sucker for strings and it has them aplenty, a hallucinogenic tide that by the end carries you along on a swell of sound.
This trip is an endless story
We’re taking you on a journey
22nd November, 2008 | 78 views
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I think this was the first record that I bought on the then fledgling Guidance Recordings label which in it’s first fifty or so releases, heralded the beginning of a new wave of deep house productions in the latter part of the nineties. An ear catching feast of deep vibes mixed with edible lyrics.
Something smells good, we cookin’ now!
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5th November, 2008 | 90 views
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A short mix but still enough time to induce feelings of peacefulness and tranquillity, more familiar to some for the techno rave Pure Energy mix on the A side which now sounds a little dated. Plan to incorporate this into an ambient mix in the near future.
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4th November, 2008 | 132 views
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A new Bond film is out and this wouldn’t be out of place in one of the films from the sixties. I see the chanteuse as an unwilling accomplice to the cat-stroking villain, probably imprisoned against her will in some undersea lair of villainousness until rescued by 007. Naturally unable to help herself in the presence of her rescuer, it would be the music of coitus as their escape pod awaited rescue, bobbing about in some Asian sea somewhere.
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3rd November, 2008 | 85 views
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Berwick Street in Soho has always been home to a few shops for vinyl junkies even if the area as a whole has seen a decline in their number; I was there recently and noticed the building at the end of the street had been demolished. This was the former location of the Ambient Soho music shop although it had ceased trading at that actual spot some years previously and it was also where I got this release. Colin Dale pushed this track on his Kiss 100 show and, if I recall correctly, mentioned that Ambient Soho as one place to get it, so off there I went. The bassline and beats have been lifted from Hall & Oates – I Can’t Go For That (No Can Do), another track that is also a personal favourite of mine but transformed here into a mellow electronica excursion by Erik Van Den Broek.
Welcome to my future world
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