it's all good…

Photek wields his brush and paints a cinematic soundscape on his electronic canvas and illuminates one possible path for drum’n'bass from 1996…

Save the bees! Listen to this track…

Bukem returns to his deep house roots with a lush composition…

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

The definitive version of this track which has been recorded numerous times, although I also have the version by We Five on seven. Love, peace and flowers drip out of the grooves in this universal paean to just getting along maaan, provoking big smiles and the involuntary rocking of the head from side to side to any listeners. Indelibly connected in my mind to the movie adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, as it was used in the soundtrack that introduced me to some outstanding ‘new’ music. Dialogue from the movie is used to bridge some of the songs on it and Johnny Depp utters the monologue below (adjusted only slightly from the novel) just before the Youngbloods track fades in:

San Francisco in middle of the sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive, in that corner of time in the world, whatever it meant. There was madness in any direction, at any hour, you could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning and that I think was the handle.

That sense of inevitable victory over the forces of old and evil, not in any mean or military sense, we didn’t need that; our energy would simply prevail. We had all the momentum, we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look west and with the right kind of eyes, you can almost see the high water mark; that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

Buy It

Discogs entry

Deep music for deep space – a vital second release by an alias of Izmo from the new Balance Alliance label.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

This track has been played by more than one presenter on the EstimuloShow which is testament to it’s strength and it deserves a post in it’s own right. Released at the tail end of 2008, it’s a sleeper that gets better with repeated listens and it still widely available now. Like drinking that ‘extra’ glass of wine, it brings intoxication to the ears, a tapestry of swirling sounds that sweeps you up on a magic carpet ride into that perfect world that few tracks conjure up. Nor should the lushness of this track overshadow the other two tracks by Ron Trent and Trinidadian Deep, which in themselves still make this release worth buying. Seek and buy on sight!

Buy It

Discogs entry

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

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.

Discogs listing

Buy on: discogs | gemm | musicstack

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

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.

Discogs listing

Buy on: discogs | gemm | musicstack

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

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

Buy It

Discogs entry

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

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.

Buy on: discogs | gemm | musicstack

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

The Ambient Collection, the album this track is from, along with The KLF’s Chill Out, were possibly the first two releases of the early nineties ambient era that I came across that built on my then fledgling taste in this genre of electronic music, adding to some of the possibilities that I had been introduced to by the German electronic outfit, Tangerine Dream. The whole album is a high quality tapestry of sounds from start to finish but, when forced to choose, this aural evocation of a desert isle with the crystal clear sea lapping gently at shoreline, transports me instantly in my mind’s eye. A brief free holiday, which is no bad thing living in the UK.

Notes from sleeve:

With the advent of the nineties a new decade of clubs and DJ’s have floated into our conciousness. Their trip is a journey into peace. An ambient ecstasy. The creation of a new musical travelogue. A minimalistic embrace of everything good about the hard and uncompromising trance-dance of house and the surrealism of ambient instrumentalism.

Ambient or ‘chill-out’ rooms have been set up in clubs all around the country as an alternative to the dancefloor. Pure ecstasy escapism. Rooms for day-dreaming, fantasising or hallucinating.

This ambient collection is a sound step into the future. A collection of tracks alternatively known as ‘New Age House’ or ‘Ambient House’. Everyday sounds, noises and atmospheres we’ve imagined and heard all our lives but never consciously listened to. An unfocused daydream with no background or foreground. A sense of not being yourself, of being apart from what you’re listening to. A drift into tranquillity, in and out of reality.

Oft played and more than often sampled the Art Of Noise have long been torchbearers for this form of ambient instrumentalism.

This collection has been compiled, defiled, remixed and generally ‘presided over’ by producer ‘Youth’. His thanks go to those who worked after ‘nights high noon’.

So…..chill out.

The sleeve notes above are interesting in that the concept of the ‘chill out’ room has disappeared in clubs, perhaps coinciding with the commercialization of club/rave culture. The youth movement had been co-opted, re-packaged and sold back to the generation that spawned it. The reaction of the establishment in the face of the moral panic that was provoked by the first wave in the late eighties, meant that licenced venues had new rules to abide by and these didn’t include providing rooms with cushions for people to lie down, relax, dream or talk in. Bloody chillers didn’t buy many alcoholic drinks anyway…

Buy on: discogs | gemm | musicstack