When Chillout works
Chillout is the only music on this dial that was not repurposed for the time of day it sits in. These records were written for the end of the night by people who had been at the end of a lot of nights, and it shows in how they handle silence.
The genre has an image problem, and the image is a beach compilation with a sunset on the cover. Fair enough — there are hundreds of those and most are furniture. The five below are albums, made by people with something to say, and they survive being listened to rather than merely left on.
Midnight is the natural cut-off. After that the classical page takes over, because by one in the morning even downtempo has too many drums in it.
Where it came from
This is the only music on the dial that was named after a room. Club nights in the late eighties kept a quieter space off the dance floor, and what got played there became the genre — The KLF put out an album called Chill Out in 1990 and the word stuck.
The second source is a terrace. The Café del Mar in Ibiza had a resident, José Padilla, who played records to the sunset; the first compilation under the bar's name came out in 1994 and sold the idea of a place to people who would never go there.
The third is Bristol, where Massive Attack made Blue Lines in 1991 at a tempo nobody else on British radio was using. Everything on this page descends from one of those three, and the albums are the ones that survive being listened to rather than merely left on.
Chillout: five records
- Massive Attack, 1991Blue Lines.
Where the whole thing starts. Slower than anything else on the radio in 1991 and entirely sure of itself. The record was made in a Bristol basement on borrowed equipment over eight months, and the slow tempo came from the sound systems the group had grown up playing to.
- Air, 1998Moon Safari.
Two Frenchmen with old synthesisers and perfect taste. Still the best-sounding record of its decade. Air built it on a Wurlitzer, a Minimoog and a vocoder bought second-hand, and refused to use a computer for anything except the final edit.
- Thievery Corporation, 2000The Mirror Conspiracy.
Dub, bossa nova and Indian instruments, assembled with more care than the genre usually gets. Garza and Hilton ran their own label and recorded most of it in a basement in Washington, with guest singers brought in one at a time over three years.
- Zero 7, 2001Simple Things.
Three singers, including Sia before anyone knew. The songs are better than the production, which is unusual here. Sia Furler sings three tracks and was unknown; the record went platinum in Britain before anyone outside the studio knew her name.
- Bonobo, 2010Black Sands.
A live band playing music built from samples. The one record here that gets better on a good system. Simon Green rebuilt his own samples as live parts for a nine-piece band, so the record keeps opening up on a good system instead of flattening.
The honest objection
The first Café del Mar compilation from 1994 did more for this music than any of the five, and it's not a record so much as a room. I left it off because a compilation teaches you nothing about how an album is built. If your interest is the mood rather than the craft, start there instead and ignore this page.
The faces on the records
William Gottlieb photographed the New York clubs between 1938 and 1948 for Down Beat and the Washington Post. The Library of Congress holds the negatives; the pictures are in the public domain.
