it's all good…

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

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.

Just one track from an accomplished album with perfect production from Daniel Lanois and Tony Mangurian, these are all simply just great songs. My path to discovering the ‘Fever In Fever Out‘ album were the tracks “Naked Eye” and “Under Your Skin” which were, to me, groovy rock tracks with overt dance sensibilities, so it’s perhaps not surprising that this album was released on the Beastie Boys’ Grand Royal record label. ‘Take A Ride’ has a chilled out mellow vibe with complimentary over-dubbed vocal harmonies and a bass that loiters across the track.

Live slow, die old
Live slow, die old

Buy on: discogs | gemm | musicstack