Ambient Electronica 94-06

Perfect Chill Out
by: Neil \'Wolfie\' Sweeney

There’s no doubt Pete Warren is a professional; he works for the BBC as a graphic, interactive and sound designer, has been involved in BAFTA award winning projects - he’s even made his own font! But now Pete Warren has moved to create an album that is a collection of his work since 1994.

The album has been praised by Rob da Bank, co-host of The Blue Room on BBC Radio 1 DJ.

It’s not hard to notice that this is a well produced and cared for music, every sample and every note thought through to produce the best in ambient electro. It’s an album which you can sit back and relax to without; there are no lyrics to tie you into that feeling of singing along making it very good to chill out too. Simply throw it into your CD player, turn the speakers up, get into a comfy chair and chill out; put it into your MP3 player and relax where ever you maybe sat. There is no need to skip tracks here.

Coming from more rock roots here (punk and metal type stuff), I do like a bit of noise blasting out of my stereo; but often, you need to chill out and although there are soft songs in rock, they don’t cut it and you need to branch out to something which you often avoid [can’t remember the last time I went into the electro isle in my local CD shop! – Ed.]. This is worth a try for anybody who could do with something that’s just soft melodic and not in need of anything sharp.

My only real criticism is that there’s maybe not enough going on foreground-wise to pull you in to going deeper into the tunes. One track does provide something along this line; “Insomniac”, pulls out of its shell at time and gets you more engrossed into the music while not letting it by, which is a shame because you can let a lot of the tunes go by without noticing it. But that’s the risk with being ambient in that it is background noise at times when it could be more there with you.

Overall, the music is of high quality, very expectant of somebody who is a sound designer for the BBC, and is worth a listen to by anybody wanting that lo-fi chill out CD. If you’re a fan of ambient music, you should already own it.