Psymeditation 2

If you picked up the first Psymeditation, then my guess is you know what to expect. Deep chill that’s unashamedly shanti in its flavour: this is the sort of thing you can play if you own a shop that sells hammocks and incense, and not feel silly. Deep 4D production is the flavour of the day, from the opening lotus of Perpetual Loop’s Morning Chant, one of the finest bits of shantichill in recent years. Noodrerm’s Open The Doors To Your Heart has delicious skittering drums over an unfurling, expanding new age backbone, the overall result being a kind of karmic pornfilm soundtrack, ideal stuff for getting your spiritual freak on.

Organic Sunrise & Pale Moon Rising’s Spiritual Dimension is awash with sounds, as thought it’s not the music itself that affects you, but the frequencies they occupy – staggeringly good production here. The new Liquid Records darlings of chill form the centrepiece to the album: Slack Baba’s Drink More Tea is a stroll-in-the-park bit of summer dub, and Nagual Sound Experiment’s Grainface is a sublime bit of multi-drum chill-brained jazz-hop, much better at being interesting than a lot of other pretenders. Nice stuff. Perpetual Loop’s Spirit sounds a bit like something Moby might have come up with circa Go!, if he’d been smoking DMT up in the mountains of India with Mark Allen and Tsuyoshi instead of living in some million-dollar loft conversion in New York.

Unconscious Collective’s A New Way Of Thinking sounds uncannily like the sort of exhausted, drained falling-asleep that you can only get from valium… if there’s anything deeper, it probably got swallowed up when the big bang happened. Lemon Tree’s Spirit sounds a little washed-out and noodly, but is worth noting for its summer festival falafel and chai-ness. Finally Ganja Beats’ Floating In Rainbow Bubbles (Ultra Chill Mix) does more or less what it says on the tin, a gradual back-to-life recovery track with the perfect amount of 4-4, and at the perfect tempo. As hippy-flavoured chill goes, then, Psymeditation 2 is pretty much unbeatable.

It’s not dubby in an Interchill way, and it’s not even close to that sophisticated, lounge-chill hybrid that’s been cropping up lately. If you still get a kick out of your Return To The Source Chakra Journey CD2, this is very much for you.