Post #164241 by Tiki-bot on Tue, Jun 7, 2005 1:08 PM

I've been listening to "chill" music for 25 years. Modern chill has evolved into a kind of sanitized, "easy listening" style that's not too interesting and fairly disposeable, imho. It's getting very hard to find chill music that has real staying power, i.e., something produced by true artists you can listen to 10 years from now, and not just something a record company threw together to capitalize on the chill craze.

I've posted a couple songs by great chill composers/DJs on my site that I think are good examples of high quality, time-tested, exotica-inflected chill:

http://www.tikibot.com/songs/big_sea.mp3
A nice, moody, almost-exotica piece by the DJ collective known as Funki Porcini.

http://www.tikibot.com/songs/hovering_glows.mp3
A classic (over 10 years old!) by Terre Thaemlitz, one of the modern chill pioneers.

Other great chill and ambient artists to check out are:
Harold Budd (my overall fave)
Biosphere
Loop Guru
DJ Shadow
Boards of Canada
Space Time Continuum
"Pop Ambient" series
Aphex Twin
Michael Brook
Brian Eno (search TC for recent Eno thread)

Most of these artists are primarily DJ/chill/ambient type music, but some veer into mild techno or groove stuff (Biosphere).

There's so much great music like this out there, I don't know why people continually settle for dreck like Enya or Deep Forest or Enigma. Blah!