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

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...

Second Hand

I've been listening to the first volume of the Cafe Del Mar series recently, the compilations that dubiously invented 'chill'. I don't like the concept or genre of 'chill'. And it became an adman's wet dream. But Cafe Del Mar Volume 1 is really good, with Sabres of Paradise, Penguin Cafe Orchestra, A Man Called Adam, Leftfield, Underworld and others. The only other Cafe Del Mar comp I got was volume 2, then I abandoned the series in a fit of anti-chill, anti-populist pique. My loss probably. Tucked away on the third side of vinyl (or track 8 on the cd) is Second Hand by Underworld. Second Hand is a re-working of a track from Dark And Long. It is still long (9 minutes plus), pretty dark, but subtle and very hypnotic, head music and dance music, all minimal squiggles and ticks and swooshes. Then the drums come in at around the half way point and we're off...

Second Hand