- The aesthetic triumph of ambient and chillout.
- I started going to clubs in earnest in the mid-2000s, which means my chillout room experiences are scarce. But thinking back over a thousand nights in dark, smoky rooms, there is one moment, away from the main floor action, that changed my life. I was privileged enough to attend the tenth anniversary party at Unit, a multi-floor club in Shibuya with perfect sound. Earlier in the evening I witnessed Cluster play an admirably obtuse live set to thousands of agog Japanese musos at peak time. As the hours dragged on, punters found places to sleep in various corners of the club, avoiding exorbitant cab fees by waiting for the train to start up. Towards morning, I was upstairs in a moderately-lit room lined by benches featuring a DJ playing mellow music. I found a place to sit and dozed off. My companion eventually came by and nudged me, rousing me just in time for Cluster & Eno's "Wehrmut," which remains one of my favorite pieces of ambient music.
Excuse the ramble, but my thoughts drifted when listening to Virtual Dreams: Ambient Explorations In The House & Techno Age, 1993-1997, the sublime new compilation that serves as Music From Memory's 50th release. Compiled by MFM cofounder Jamie Tiller, the collection looks over the mid-period of a genre that had its roots in chill-out rooms, music that by the mid-'90s attempted to reconcile the spacey futurism of Detroit techno, the starry-eyed cosmic music of the Germans and the hippie-tech utopia of the early internet. In many ways—prior to the home-listening intent brought on by IDM—it was the music of fantasy.
"It seems somehow fitting that this mind music, big on emotion and dreams, would always exceed its physical habitat," Piers Harrison writes in Virtual Dreams' liner notes. "Often due to the quieter volume levels, chill-out zones would suffer from an appalling sound bleed of the 4/4 beat from the main room. It might have also acted as a de facto coat room, and the number of people overwhelmed by their chemical exuberance might have meant that the atmosphere wasn't as reverential as it could have been."
How lucky are we, then, to reassess this music away from the difficult logistics of the chill-out room, amidst a renewed interest in ambient music, chill-out, downtempo and trance. The best tracks on Virtual Dreams haven't aged a day. David Moufang, best known as the house DJ Move D, is featured in his previous ambient house guise with the incredible "Sergio Leone's Wet Dream," a beatless cut that strongly reminisces Ashra's 1977 landmark Kraut synth odyssey, "Sunrain." Midway through the compilation, Tiller blesses us with some slo-mo bangers like Sideral's "Mare Nostrum," a loping, 100 BPM acid track reminiscent of Mr Fingers' romantic early '90s material. Then there's Roman Flügel and Jörn Elling Wuttke's blissful "Levitation," released in 1994 on their self-titled LP as The Primitive Painter. The eight-minute cut smears a sample of A Guy Called Gerald's "Voodoo Ray" with analog synthesizers.
The DNA of dance music was always present in this music. "It was all related to rave, but we felt like we were stretching out towards the left field," key ambient house figure Jonah Sharp (Reflective records, Spacetime Continuum) told Join The Future's Matt Anniss in 2016. You can hear the echoes of the main room in the rave-friendly stabs on LFO rarity "Helen." The drums that begin sound artist Taylor Deupree's piano-infused downtempo cut "∞" bear an uncanny resemblance to the iconic didgeridoo-like sound from Jaydee's "Plastic Dreams."
At the end of the day, this was music for electronic music nerds more interested in synthesizers and psychedelics than getting their faces melted by high-octane rave tracks. The ideological similarity of this music—made in Germany, Barcelona, San Francisco and especially the UK—suggests small, tight-knit nodes fueled by the early promise of the internet. David Moufang made an early '90s pilgrimage to San Francisco to meet and jam with Jonah Sharp. Terence McKenna was beamed in via an early ISDN connection at the Megatripolis night at London club Heaven and performed live with Sharp for what would become the 1993 Space Time Continuum LP, Alien Dreamtime.
Building on a long tradition of chill-out compilations, good and bad, Tiller benefits from hindsight and modern digger culture, picking the cream of the crop from CD-only compilations, early 12-inches and legendary collections like Warp Records' Artificial Intelligence II. The result is timeless. This is music to trip out to, to dance to, to doze off to. A soaring pitch-bent synth lead might wake you up like some blissful, half-remembered dream.
Tracklist01. MLO - Birds And Flutes
02. Pulusha - Isolation (Part Two)
03. MDA Analog - Rainful Memories
04. Space Time Continuum - Fluresence
05. David Moufang - Sergio Leone's Wet Dream
06. LA Synthesis - Frozen Tundra Dub
07. Richard H. Kirk - Oneski
08. A Positive Life - The Calling (Loved'Ub Mix)
09. Sideral - Mare Nostrum
10. The Primitive Painter - Levitation
11. Sun Electric - Love 2 Love
12. LFO - Helen
13. Dubtribe Sound System - Sunshine's Theme(Sunshine's Remix)
14. Human Mesh Dance - ∞
15. Link - Arcadian (Global Communication Remix)
16. The Arc - Orphic Mysteries
17. Bedouin Ascent - Joyriding III