Following on from the success of 2004’s Trip mix by former Jedi Knight/Global Communication beard lover extrordinaire, Tom Middleton, is this new selection of loungeroom bumps designed to take you on a musical adventure across varying styles, eras and flavours. On first listen I thought it was a real mess, with tracks ending abruptly and the ‘blend’ being really ill conceived and sloppily placed on the disc.
It’s only today that I have gone online to discover that the official version of this mix is actually a 2CD set (as are all the previous releases in this series – silly me) and the single disc promo I am reviewing was probably edited thusly to fit as many tracks from the mix as possible. Flow and editing aside, the artists represented cover a wide spectrum, from the more well known groove merchants such as Boozoo Bajoo, The Thievery Corporation, Quantic, Breakestra and Stereo MCs to lesser knowns/newcomers like Mahalia Rai Banda, Skewiff, JD73 and Cicada.
Middleton also represents hip hop (Eric B & Rakim, RJD2, Jungle Bros), pop (Beck, Goldfrapp) and several electronic and soundtrack composers (The Orb, Stanley Myers,Tangerine Dream).
All in all, this plays as a fairly solid selection, but I feel that a lot of the artists here have been represented more than adequately in the past via the glut of ‘chill out’s compilations that seemed to be flooding music stores over the past five years or more. I would have enjoyed the challenge of hearing Middleton repeat the wildly eclectic selection he made on his first volume compiled for this series (The Trip’s biggest seller to date), which really opened up the doors for the more casual music collector to some far out sounds that might have gone unnoticed and kept the trainspotters happy as well.
