The K.L.F. - Chill Out (1994)

Usually separated from the dancefloor, the 'chillout area' started to appear in clubs following the dance revolution of the early 1990s, as electronic dance music began to migrate to clubs following the outdoor rave scene of the acid house era. The introduction of these rooms to dance clubs may have been partly due to a code of conduct introduced in Manchester, UK at the end of 1992, which specified that clubs should provide seating in a quieter area along with free drinking water or risk losing their licences (source: The Independent, 16 December 1992). At the same time, as house music was evolving and incorporating elements from the rave scene, some producers slowed down the beats and used synths and samplers to create melodic soundscapes. Commercial examples of this sound include The KLF with their reworked version 3am Eternal, reaching UK Number 1 in January 1991, and The Orb's Little Fluffy Clouds, released in 1990. This style could be seen as a forerunner to both chillout and trance. By 1992 - 1993, artists such as The Orb were producing an even more chilled, experimental version of this style on tracks such as Blue Room. Some producers started taking the idea further and dropped the beats altogether, concentrating on more minimal, electronic textures. This music became the modern version of 'ambient', a term which had been around since the 1970s to describe a sparse and minimal music blending into the background.

The mid 1990s saw a growth period for ambient music, and early chillout rooms began to play this music which was ideally suited for a relaxation zone within a club. Ironically, perhaps part of the reason why this music became popular was because the majority of dance music was becoming faster; at the start of 1992, many rave DJs were playing a mixture of breakbeat hardcore and techno at 130 - 140bpm, while by the end of 1993 many of the same DJs were playing early jungle and drum and bass at 160bpm. Even house music had become faster, from 120 - 125bpm when acid house first took hold in the UK in 1988 up to 140bpm as genres such as speed garage and hard house began to diverge around 1996. During the same period, the Criminal Justice Act of 1994 came into force, prohibiting outdoor gatherings where amplified music is present, especially music "wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats" (source: BBC), which had the effect of forcing the remains of the outdoor rave scene into dance clubs. As the clubs opened later to simulate all-night rave events, many people were no longer able to dance solidly until closing time and welcomed the introduction of the chillout room, which enabled tired ravers to take a break.

Download Zip

Ambient music also merged with other genres such as jungle; in 1994 and 1995, early drum and bass music was built around jungle breakbeats with ambient pads and textures. During the mid-1990s, ambient began to diversify, as did the chillout room itself; a drum and bass club might play ambient drum and bass and downtempo breaks in its chillout room while a house club might play ambient house. Pure ambient music began to take a lower profile, and the soothing drones of single pads with no backing rhythm became the preserve of more experimental labels, being replaced by more genre-specific variants of chilled dance music. Whilst early ambient music was experimental, as its popularity grew with clubbers, so its sound became more mainstream.

Ibiza also played a part in the development of chillout music. In its height of popularity as a clubbing holiday destination, UK club promoters would travel to the island with their DJs and put on sets until sunrise. As people were on holiday and didn't need to leave the club to prepare for work, a 'chillout' DJ would be put on the decks to allow clubbers to unwind as the sun rose, playing slower, gentle electronic music. Perhaps the best known chillout venue on Ibiza is the legendary Cafe Del Mar bar, which has specialised in promoting 'music for sunsets' and has released chillout compilations since 1994 (source: Cafe Del Mar). By 2001, uplifting, melodic synthesizer-based downtempo music was being played in the chillout rooms of many UK clubs to accompany the main room trance sound popular at the turn of the millennium. This music featured the trademark trance pads and even arpeggios, but was often accompanied by either a downtempo beat or occasionally no beat at all, as in Michael Woods' remix of Saints and Sinners' Peace.

Trip-hop wasn't necessarily relaxing like ambient music; it was often moody and dark. The one thing it did have in common with ambient music, however, was its slowed-down tempo. An interesting thing about trip-hop is that, while the name of the genre is hardly used today, the slowed down electronic and sampled beats gradually merged with other genres to such an extent that by the turn of the millennium, pop, rock, dance and even folk artists may use beats that were originally the preserve of trip-hop artists. An early example of trip-hop combining dark hip-hop beats with chilled elements is Rob Dougan's Clubbed To Death, which was originally released in 1995 and gained widespread popularity in 1999 after being used in the popular movie The Matrix. This track featured prominently on the chillout music compilations of the early 2000s alongside Cafe Del Mar style chilled trance, illustrating the diverse styles associated with the genre. Slowed down trip-hop beats soon found their way into more uplifting tracks, such as Groove Armada's At The River, released in 1997 and climbing into the UK Top 20 on its re-release in July 1999.

Another development was a trend towards melodic instrumental electronica. Towards the end of the 1990s, artists as diverse as 4 Hero and Moby were playing around with incorporating acoustic sounds into electronic styles. 4 Hero's Two Pages mixed orchestral strings with drum and bass in 1998. Moby's hit album, Play, combined piano, strings and gospel choirs to create downtempo dance music. Moby is sometimes labelled as a chillout artist, although those who have listened to his music for long enough will recognise that he defies categorisation.

Around the turn of the millennium, record companies looking for the next 'big thing' to market jumped upon these converging styles and by 2001 dozens of chillout compilations were in high street shops, featuring a mixture of ambient, downtempo, instrumental electronica and trip-hop, with pictures of beaches and sunsets on their covers. Perhaps one of the reasons that chillout now covers such a broad range of styles is that, unlike other genres such as trance, people wouldn't normally go to a 'chillout' specific club. Some chillout, especially the ambient variety, is hard or impossible to dance to, so its purpose is more for listening; this makes it accessible to a wider audience than just club-goers.

By the end of the 2000s, the type of material featuring on mainstream chillout music compilations had become even more diverse, and chillout began to be a reference for any contemporary downtempo music; rock band Coldplay's Trouble appears on the Ministry of Sound Chilled II album released in 2009, alongside Daft Punk's uptempo electronic house funk track Digital Love, for example. During the last decade, elements from trip-hop, instrumental electronica and trance have been incorporated into modern pop music, such as slowed down drums, synthesizer pads, arpeggios, heavily reverbed acoustic guitar and strings, and the backing music to many contemporary downtempo chart tracks could fit the chillout genre. In the last decade underground chillout music has continued to develop and has explored new directions, taking influences from lounge and jazz music. A good example of contemporary chillout grooves can be found on Ben Mynott's Chillout Lounge compilation series.

Another fine release, that is chilling in its seductive evil beauty, is City Of Light, in which Bill Laswell and Tetsu Inoue collab with two members of Coil. This album can easily become an obsession.

While also drawing on ambient and chillout elements, ambient-techno would be associated with labels such as Warp, R&S, Apollo & GPR. Releases focused more on albums than 12-inches. The genre also departed from dance-oriented sound heard at raves and instead saw popularity as a form of electronic listening music. Some of the best music makers in the genre from 1990 to 2020 with a 60 track mix of 4 h 33 min.

More of a post-club home listening album than a chillout room piece in its own right, Chill Out nevertheless helped to define the idea of chillout as a style of music. Before long, the concept of chillout started to establish itself as an even wider, looser term that took in everything from Balearic beats to downtempo house, ambient experimentalism, subtle jazz, mellow trance, Latin music and even soft rock.

The Ibiza connection became particularly crucial in terms of the commercial packaging of chillout, with links to CafÃ Del Mar sunsets and images of immaculate beaches and, regrettably, bikini-clad women often being used as a shorthand for chilled vibes. Rising interest in CD compilations sparked a trend for cookie-cutter albums with predictable names such as The Very Best 100% Ultimate Chilled Ibiza Essential Sunset Chillout... Ever.

For the next generation, the idea returned with the creation of chillwave around 2009, to which we will return in due course. The chillout room may be vanishingly rare in a 21st century club context, but the idea of chilling out to music very much lives on.

Riding the ambient house wave, The Orb have released a concept album that mixes dance beats with new age textures. Tim Goodyer tunes in to Alex Paterson and Thrash as they chill out with technology.

AS THE LAST DECADE OF THE 20TH century gets underway, the emergence of a new musical form is at least as unlikely as at any other time in musical history. Perhaps the most recent "new" musical form is rap - although even in the form we now recognise it, it's over ten years old. The electronic music which grew out of German studios is the next most recent arrival, dating back to the early 70s - but owing much to the work of Karlheinz Stockhausen back in the '50s. New Age music owes almost everything to Brian Eno's ambient style which emerged in the late 70s. And world music, while new to most Western ears, has been alive for generations in its native countries. Even tracing the roots of rock back to the rock 'n' roll of the mid-'50s leaves us asking embarrassing questions about just how much it was new, and how much directly lifted from uncredited black blues and R&B artists.

None of this is to say that there haven't been plenty of recent developments in the field of popular music, however. If we accept fresh combinations of existing musical forms as being "new", then the list is long indeed - in the 70s rock paired itself with everything from jazz and folk to the classics, while the late '80s/early '90s have seen house going through similar contortions. Recently we saw the Beatmasters and Kool Rock Steady rowing it out over who invented hip house. Now we're being asked to welcome ambient house.

On the surface, the unrelenting beat characteristic of house music couldn't have less in common with the floating, arhythmic textures of ambient music. Where house pounds itself into your awareness, ambient music works almost subliminally, suggesting an atmosphere. Could they ever find themselves elements of the same piece of music, and if so how?

To date, only two ambient house LPs have been released. Last year the KLF released Chill Out (KLF Communications), 45 minutes of unrelated sounds and samples slowly drifting in and out of the mix. Nowhere else could you expect to find Acker Bilk sharing vinyl with Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac and train sound effects. As you read this, the second ambient house album will just have been released. It is The Orb's Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld (Wau Mr Modo/Big Life), it runs for a little under two hours and it's the work of The Orb.

Closer examination of the project reveals it to be the brainchild of Dr Alex Paterson - one time partner of the KLF's Jimmy Cauty. Although the ideas behind the project date back over two years, the recording itself was a fairly swift affair conducted late last summer with the help of ex-Killing Joker Youth, (re)mix engineer Thrash and a list of musicians which includes Steve Hillage, Sunsonic's Ben Watkins and (appropriately enough) latter-day Pink Floyd bass guitarist, Guy Pratt. Taking a break from mixing material for a new band calling themselves Ultimate Bob, Paterson and Thrash have a date with MT.

Two Orb singles pre-date the release of Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld: 'A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain that Rules from the Centre of the Ultraworld' and 'Little Fluffy Clouds' made an impact on America's Rockpool chart as well as London's clubland last year, and a track called 'Peace (in the Middle East)' was released earlier this year under the name Apollo XI as a reaction to the Gulf war. Currently another track off the LP, 'Perpetual Dawn' has been seriously re-recorded and remixed to become a third Orb single. But it is only in the context of long-playing vinyl - or better, Compact Disc - that the true nature of the music is revealed. The opening cut, 'Little Fluffy Clouds', is typical of half the material, featuring house drum beats overlaid with ambient textures and (in this case) a monologue in which Rickie Lee Jones describes scenes from her childhood. (Eno meets Frankie Knuckles?) The remainder of the material is ambient, relying purely on textures and sound effects.

A bizarre marriage of material in theory, it all starts to make sense when you consider Paterson's background. Once a drum roadie for Killing Joke, he subsequently became an A&R man at EG Records - Eno's label at the time - and then went on to become a DJ.

"Working for EG and being a house DJ, it seemed all very obvious - to me, that was, although not to a lot of other people at the end of 1987/88", he declares. "It's only this year that people have accepted it; last year it was all techno and the German stuff, the Italian stuff."

Alex Paterson - his "doctorate" status due to manipulation of his initials rather than a stint in the educational establishment, incidentally - admits to being heavily influenced by Eno and his ambient experiments.

"I was 19 when I first heard an album of his", he recalls, "It was Music for Films, and it had just come out. I was in Germany on the 11th floor of a council block looking over the Ruhr at these huge foundry works pumping steel. It looked like a huge fire in the distance. I was also under the influence of hallucinogenics at the time, and I spent a day-and-a-half just listening to that album. I was working with Killing Joke who had just signed to EG, and I found out Eno was signed to them too. It seemed the perfect opportunity to get into it. From there I discovered that a lot of the albums I had previously been into - like Ultravox' first album, Bowie's Heroes and Low, two of my all-time favourite albums - were produced by him.

"I then got a job as an A&R man at EG", he continues. "EG are famous for their compilation albums, so it would be 'would you like to compile an ambient collection?; would you like to compile an Eno CD-only boxed set?'. So for weeks I'd be working on different tracks, looking at the chords, and I found he relies a lot on that 'singular note that stands out' theory. But he never took it far enough for me.

"Then house came along and I was being asked to DJ at all sorts of events - fashion shows and things - and I started putting the two sides together."

Originally The Orb project involved Paterson and Cauty. The partnership was ill-fated, however, and left Paterson to continue on his own. Three singles and an LP suggest it was the right decision.

"Chill Out was a direct idea of my own and Jimmy's DJing together", explains Paterson of the KLF's venture into ambient house. "It's very much like a session I would do when I was DJing two-and-a-half years ago. I think it gave a lot of people a lot of ideas and cleared the way for The Orb album. It opened a lot of peoples' heads up. The KLF - bless 'em - thought there might be a little bit of money in sticking out an ambient house album when there was such a big buzz about it. They did that on their label, KLF Communications. At the time that Chill Out was released, Jimmy and I were actually setting up a deal as The Orb with Big Life, but Jimmy and I split up, so I had to re-think the whole Orb idea - whether to go on, whether to invite somebody else to join me. Through my experience with Jimmy I decided to do it on my own. I had to get the whole thing out of the way and see what happened, and this is what's happened. Now I'm fed up of arguing with myself, so I've got Thrash to argue with."

Where Chill Out appeared as a meandering collection of unrelated sounds, Adventures... - which went into the album charts at No. 26 as this was being written - contains pleasing combinations of beats, textures and even melodies.

"It's not a dance album as such", proclaims Paterson, "it's a crossover album, if you need to file it under something in your record collection. I wouldn't even say it's contemporary - it's in a different world."

The viability of ambient music has been adequately proven by the burgeoning new age catalogue - but why should ambient music have a place in club culture?

"It works in a club in a chill out situation", comes the confident reply. "Without drums, you can do what we're doing - sitting having a conversation. It gives you a bit of social space to work your ideas out, work deals out."

Outside the club, the word "concept" looms large. The Orb itself seems to have acquired a character of its own in Paterson's awareness - he frequently refers to the "Orb style". Meanwhile Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld, complete with a cover shot of Battersea power station reminiscent of Pink Floyd's 77 album Animals sleeve design, is undeniably a concept album.

"Yeah, it looks like it", concedes its maker with a broad grin. "This is the word.

d0d94e66b7