sleepy mondays

"Berry Meditation" by UNKLE -- This is some fairly rare wax, from a MoWax promo 12" I got in England... the official release has a cool photo of a kid wearing a storm-trooper helmet, but this guy's got the nice UNKLE alien-robots designed by Futura. This is your basic mid-90s downtempo goodness. This incarnation of the group is James Lavelle, Kudo, and Tim Goldsworthy, with Money Mark going for the assist, playing keyboards. The Trancendental Meditation stuff at the beginning of the song is funny and weird, but filtered ring-modulated sounds, paired with the ultra-flanged hard-break drums are what make the track better than your average chillout tune. If you want your own copy, which you should becaue the remixes are solid (ie "The Darker the Berry the Sweeter the Juice" Mix by Attica Blues), you'll have to pony up some cash.

"Back" by Alpha -- This is one of my favorite downtempo tracks, period. Alpha's music is very dream-like, the kind where you're wandering through a field, an hour before sunset, its mid-July but not too hot... bugs flit around, the tall grass waves in the breeze, and everything feels okay, yet you can't shake some sinister feeling that's been bugging you in the back of your mind... Anyway, Alpha is/was on the Melankolic label, (started by Massive Attack, and owned by their manager, Mark Picken), which had a string of good, if somewhat derivative, releases through the late-90s. Your basic downtempo, Bristol-beats sound, but Alpha's use of sampled strings, and loads of Bacharach, makes for some kind of pretty genius. With vocals by Martin Barnard, this cut in particular gets me because of the deep, rolling bassline. Mmmmmm, yummy. Buy the album, Come From Heaven, for more like this one.