V.A. Saturday

My photo shows the beach at Wallasey on the Wirral rather than the one that the Cafe Del Mar overlooks on Ibiza but a beach is a beach yeah? This week's various artists compilation is the sequel to last Saturday's Cafe Del Mar Volumen Uno, Volumen Dos. Sequels can be hard, difficult second album syndrome is very much a thing, following as perfectly pitched and sequenced a Balearic compilation as Cafe Del Mar Volumen Uno can't have been easy but on the whole Jose Padilla largely achieves it although the classic feel of the first one overshadows the second a bit- there's no Penguin Cafe Orchestra, no exclusive Underworld trance/ techno banger, no dub monster from Leftfield. A Man Called Adam and Sabres Of Paradise are both given second bites of the cherry with Easter Song and Haunted Dancehall and Jose himself is back with Sabor De Verano. 

Salt Tank were a duo from the UK, ambient/ trance DJs and producers making records throughout the 90s. Sargasso Sea is the kind of weightless, trippy, expansive early 90s ambient house that that period was made for, with seagulls, ripples of synth, echoing drumbeats and warm, padding bass. The Sargasso Sea is in the Atlantic and famously has no land boundaries and plenty of calm blue water 

Sargasso Sea

Entre Dos Aguas is by Paco De Lucia, a legendary Spanish guitarist and composer, a flamenco virtuoso. The song dates from 1973, and is considered a masterpiece of the form. 

Entre Dos Aguas

Cafe Del Mar finishes with Haunted Dancehall, from Sabres Of Paradise's album of the same name. Before that we get The Metaluna Mutant and their track Blinky Blue Eyed Sunrise, an experimental ambient/ downtempo outing from 1995, from an EP called Midi- Knight At The Oasis. It's a six minute excursion into abstract dance music and is very nice indeed. 

Blinky Blue Eyed Sunrise

V.A. Saturday

Following on from Wednesday's post about Penguin Cafe Orchestra's Music For A Found Harmonium, today's various artist compilation is the 1994 that made it widely available to the clubbing generation, Cafe del Mar Volumen Uno, a double album compiled by legendary DJ from the titular beach front cafe, Jose Padilla. The Cafe del Mar series ran and ran, up to Volumen Veintitres (Volume 23- there's that number again) plus some Best Ofs, Dreams, something called the Chillhouse Mixes plus some anniversary editions. It spawned the chill out genre, double CD sets to stick on while relaxing at home in the mid- 90s. We shouldn't lay the blame for all of this at the Cafe del Mar series- what came after is not the fault of those who came first- and besides Volume 1 of Cafe del Mar is a genuinely brilliant compilation, a VA classic, a perfect selection of tracks. Volumen Dos was very fine too and the subsequent ones all feature some really good tracks- you can get up to Volumen Cinco before running into diminishing returns. 

Volumen Uno is very much an ambient/ ambient house affair, with some definitive tracks, utterly essential whether heard watching the sun go down on the White Isle or coming up after a night out that ended up in a car park in Wigan in winter. It opens with Jose's own Agua, found sounds, hand drums, pan pipes and then a warm bubble bath of synths. It's followed by William Orbit's The Story of Light, six minutes of weightless drift, house rhythms eventually kicking in, chimes, wordless vocals- global ambient.

The Story Of Light

Sabres Of Paradise close side one with Smokebelch (Beatless Mix). I've written about this track before, one of those songs that has soundtracked my life in all sorts of ways- we played it at the graveside when we buried Isaac. When we did the Sabresonic Q&A at The Golden Lion in November Jagz and Gary spoke about the making of the track. It feels like it's a fundamental part of me.

Side two has Penguin Cafe Orchestra, Sun Electric's Sundance (like standing in warm rain) and Leftfield's mighty Fanfare Of Life, ambient/ dub in excelsis. Side three gives us Sisterlove's Balearic meditation The Hypnotist and then Second Hand by Underworld. This track was trailed on the sleeve as exclusive to the compilation. Underworld were at the very top of their game in 1994 and Second Hand is as good as anything else they did, nine minutes of that Underworld synth sound repeating, another wobbling synth on top, a third chirruping, a little guitar motif, everything building very gradually, no rush to hit the runway too soon. At five minutes there's a slight change, a pause almost (although everything keeps playing), some tension, the anticipation that something's about to happen, and then at six minutes twenty the kick drum starts thumping, a snare and whooosh, off we go. 

Second Hand

Side three finishes with Ver Vlads' Crazy Ivan, all drama and stormclouds. Then we're onto side four with A Man Called Adam's wondrous Estelle, Obiman's On The Rocks and finally Tabula Rasa's Sunset At The Cafe Del Mar takes us home, a track that is less a piece of music and more a feeling pressed onto vinyl, that ends with a guitar loop and the sound of waves lapping on to the shore.  

Sunset At The Cafe Del Mar

Tak Tent Two

Back in Lockdown Two I put together a second mix for Tak Tent Radio, an internet radio station based in Scotland who broadcast my first mix for them back in October (here). The second one, which I cleverly titled Tak Tent Two, went live yesterday. It is an hour of instrumental sounds, ambient, Balearic, minimal techno, shoegaze whatnot- which is pretty much where my musical head has been for the last year.

Tak Tent Two is here. Hopefully it might enhance your Sunday morning in Lockdown Three. 

• Death Circuit: Strom Dub
• Jose Padilla: Agua
• Richard Norris: Cloud Surfing
• Richard Fearless: Driving With Rodelius
• Pye Corner Audio: Phase B
• Future Beat Alliance: Beginner’s Mind
• Joe Morris: Firefly Island (Gallo Isola Acida Mix)
• The Long Champs: Straight To Audio
• Apiento and Co: The Light Machine
• Andy Bell: Heat Haze On Weyland Road

Monday's Long Song

A long song from 1981, that came to my attention via Dr. Rob (Ibiza/ London veteran currently resident in Japan) and his tribute to Jose Padilla and the Balearic sets he played at the Café del Mar. Druck is eighteen minutes long, the work of Klaus Schulze, a pioneer of West German cosmische music and briefly a member of both Tangerine Dream and Ash Ra Tempel. Schulze took on the alias Richard Wahnfried and had the good fortune/ good judgement to get Manuel Göttsching in on guitar, the man who recorded the legendary E2- E4. 

Druck

Druck is led by Spanish guitar plucking and Schulze's spaced out synths and some gentle drumming, and then acres of rippling rhythms, blissed out sounds, an extensive guitar solo, more Spanish guitar, some echo- heavy percussion and a gathering intensity. All very organic sounding. Druck comes on a double sided record called Tonwelle, paired with the slightly longer Schwung. At some point after '81 a copy made it's way to Ibiza where Padilla wove it into the sets he played at sunset at the Café del Mar. 

Still Waters

I've got a lot of time for for dance music veterans A Man Called Adam and it's not just due to us sharing a name. In the summer of 1990 their laid back Balearic house song Barefoot In The Head stuck a chord with me as did their album a year later, The Apple (rhyming slang I think, the apple corps = the score, as in 'do you know the score?'). In the last few years they've had a bit of renaissance with last year's Farmarama album and a slew of remixes. Sally and Steve have now followed this with a twenty track release, fresh out now on Bandcamp, a round up of rarities and oddities from the duo's whole career taking in demo versions, mixes, edits, a commission for the British Museum and collaborations with people such as the recently departed Jose Padilla, The Idjut Boys and Sensory Productions. There's so much going on across the twenty songs that it's difficult to take in in one sitting but there's a freshness and a flow in the music, ambient sounds, early 90s Ibizan rhythms and a very Balearic state of mind. Right now, this one with Jose Padilla is hitting the spot...

The album, Love Forgotten, is here. Their calling card, the endlessly giving Barefoot In The Head is present on it in a remixed form. There's a sample on Barefoot In The Head, some lines from a 1967 poem by Rod McKuen, where he 'puts a seashell to my ear and it all comes back'. Rod and Anita Kerr recorded the album The Sea with the San Sebastian Strings, a dreamlike slice of 1967, hippy spoken word and easy listening strings. This is where the sample comes from...

It's the sort of album you always expect to turn up in a charity shop or at a car boot sale. I'm sure the thrift stores and flea markets of the USA are full of copies of The Sea, dumped in the 1990s. As it is, over here, I'm still looking. 

José Padilla

 

José Padilla has died of cancer aged sixty four. He arrived in Ibiza in 1975 and graduated through the club scene as a DJ, playing Es Paradis and Amnesia before eventually playing sets at the Café del Mar, a bar in San Antonio that looks out over the Mediterranean and where each evening the sun dissolves into the sea. Jose would pioneer an entire new genre of music that would end up being called Chill Out. Padilla played an eclectic mix of music to accompany the sunset and afterwards and as the late 80s became the 90s his DJ sets became the thing of legend. He recorded an Essential Mix for the BBC in 1995, here, that gives an idea of his style. In 1994 he launched a series of compilation albums, out on double vinyl, that brought together the songs he played as the sun went down. Volume One and Two (or Uno and Dos to give them their proper names) are proper slices of mid 90s culture, records to play after a night out, comedown tunes to go with tea, cigarettes and chatter, the buzz of the club wearing off into something warm and glowing, songs for a Sunday morning- William Orbit, Penguin Café Orchestra, Sabres Of Paradise, Leftfield, Underworld, A Man Called Adam, Tabula Rasa...

Sunset At The Café del Mar

I've never been to the Café del Mar, never watched the ball of fire sink into the sea as José spun laidback, downtempo tunes with snaking melodies and blissed out vocals. But José's outlook has had a huge impact on my tastes and record collection, the whole idea of bringing different types of music together as long as they fit the mood, a mish- mash of old and new, dance music and oddities, ambient and Balearic, a world where A Man Called Adam's Estelle, The Art Of Noise, the theme from Hill Street Blues and Music For A Lost Harmonium all live alongside each other. I've spent hours attempting to emulate José's style in the early hours or when making tape compilations or even, now I think of it, with some of the series of Isolation Mixes I did in the spring and summer. 

Theme From Hill Street Blues

It's fair to say that what José pioneered on the shores of the Mediterranean spread worldwide in the 1990s and afterwards, ripples and waves landing on shores a long way from San Antonio. 

José Padilla, RIP.

Various Artists

I'll try to delve a little further than early 90s dance music compilations at some point but it is the various artists groove I am currently in for this series. Cafe del Mar, a series of albums named after the famous bar in San Antonio, Ibiza, gave birth to that most derided of genres, chill out. The compilation album series runs all the way up to Volume Twenty (released in 2014) but chill had eaten itself long before then.

The first album is a genuinely great compilation, on double vinyl, a round up of songs to listen to as the sun sinks into the Med and as the drugs begin to kick in, compiled by the legendary Jose Padilla himself. The tracklist for Volumen Uno has several tunes I'd take anywhere, among them Penguin Cafe Orchestra's Music For A Found Harmonium, William Orbit's The Story Of Light, Underworld's long builder Second Hand, A Man Called Adam's wonderfully up Estelle and the skyscraping Beatless Mix of Smokebelch II by Sabres Of Paradise. Plus these two, first up a dubby version of Song Of Life...

Fanfare Of Life

And this one, the closer by Tabula Rasa. Not so much a song, more a feeling.

Sunset At The Cafe Del Mar

I have never watched the sunset at the Cafe del Mar. One day it'll happen...