Essential Chillout

The way it should work is like this: you take the huge chillout compilation, load it up into the CD changer, and pipe it into your designated chill room, where those who need to come down off the ceiling can gently float back to Earth, gradually stop vibrating at a pitch only dogs can hear, and smoothly reintegrate with the flow. To aid people in achieving this goal, the chillout compilation needs one thing in particular: consistency. With that consistency, a certain balance happens. The music can flow, no problem there -- ebbing and flowing is all part of the rhythms of life that people sometimes need help re-adjusting to. This six-disc set, assembled by one Tim Millington, manages to achieve consistency only in patches -- the first two discs account for some interesting bumps, running into jazz fusion, techno, and even lounge music during the course of events, each time producing jarring transitions. Things improve somewhat on the third disc, though Ultramarine's "On the Brink" is likely to de-chill some folks with its loosey-goosey dub jazz styling; Tai Fun's "Space Food" then only adds to the scare factor. What Discordia's "Trumpets of Dawn" is doing here is hard to imagine. The compilation continues in this sort of haphazard manner -- the transitions are too jarring for comfort, and little real thought seems to have been given to the overall flow of the set, never mind individual discs. This seems very much a case of the compilation producer being handed a budget, a ten-track per disc directive (this set hails from the U.K., where mechanical royalties are fixed per-disc, rather than per-song), and about three days to come up with the running order. Despite the good patches, this is not, overall, a particularly good effort. ~ Steven E. McDonald|