Various

'SPANISH AMBIENT & ACID EXOTICISM 1983-1990'- A compilation exploring the ambient side of the Spanish electronic music produced in the '80s. It gathers musicians from various horizons and of many generations, who shared the desire to create an immersive soundscape and to combine electronic music with non-Western musical traditions. As a general rule, the Anglo-Saxon tropism did relate the Spanish peninsula's ambient music to the Balearic Sound, that is to say to the relaxing music played in Ibiza's nightclubs. But this music takes place in the productive territory of experimental musics, and particularly in its two main breeding grounds: the tape recording underground and the independent musicians-producers scene. Inseparable from the processes of self-publishing, distribution and exchange of music that were then taking place in Spain in an artisanal way, the vast underground movement ofcassettes was divided between an "ethno-trance" combining industrial beats and oriental sounds on the one hand (Esplendor Geom�trico, Miguel A. Ruiz/Orfe�n Gagarin) and unclassifiable low-fi tinkerers on the other hand (Camino Al Desv�n, Eli Gras, Mataparda, Victor Nubla). Hyperactive, this scene is radical and strongly dominated by the hardest musical styles, but the ambient, influenced by the German Kosmische Musik and "krautrock", also develops here. The second vein of Spanish ambient comes from some of the independent labels of thepeninsula (DRO, GASA, El Cometa de Madrid, EGK) whose activity will mark the return of some of the most adventurous musicians-producers of the '70s. Some were influenced byAmerican minimalism (Luis Delgado/Mec�nica Popular, Suso Saiz, Javier Segura), others by Fourth-World Music conceived by Jon Hassell and Brian Eno (Finis Africae, Jabir). Having passed through folk, ancient, traditional or contemporary music, and being familiar with improvisation and studio techniques, these artists come from a mutant hippie culture, capable of phagocyting many musical styles from electronic ambient to eth...