Super Selections and Wonderful words by Balearic Mike.

All of the following records can be heard on my 1BTN radio show, broadcast last week…

Carlos Maria Trindade / Nuno Canavarro – Mr. Wollogallu – Urpa I musell 2018 / Uniao Lisboa 1991

This is an utterly beautiful LP from start to finish. Hailing from Portugal, and originally released in 1991, it’s like a slightly more electronic version of Penguin Café Orchestra and is just as wonderful as that combination sounds in your head. 

The entire album, but a couple of tracks in particular, definitely would have been huge favourite of Jose Padilla at Café del Mar, but I have to admit that I don’t think I’ve heard any of this album on any of his tapes. That’s not to say it wasn’t played. I’ll have to ask Phil Mison next time I see him. I do recall that Lovefingers posted one of the standouts on his marvelous music blog in the early noughties, the track Blu Terra. Andrew also included it on his excellent compliation, Fingertracks Vol.1, in 2019. This totally incredible piece of music combines flutes, pan-pipes, and tabla, in a hypnotic, rhythmic, neo-classical, ambient masterpiece. It’s stunningly beautiful and prompted a lot of fruitless online searches for a copy – it was hard to find and very expensive back then.

Fast forward to summer 2018, and Balearic Wife and I have just had a wonderful holiday on the Greek Island of Hydra. On the way home we have a night in Athens, and after dinner we pop into Kasseta Records to see my friends Giannis and Dimitris. We stay in the shop drinking beers and listening to music, and they handed me a couple of records that they insisted I needed. One of them was this album, a recent reissue from a Barcelona based label, Urpa I Musell, that I was completely unaware had even been released. I was of course, made up!

My copy has been boxed away for a while, but I’ve played 2 of the tracks from it on a couple of my radio shows. My first show in May included the track Guiar, which really does sound like Penguin Café Orchestra, and the last show included Blu Terra, which is just so flippin’ gorgeous.. but as I said earlier, it’s an incredible LP, and really warrants playing in full. Other highlights are another pair of PCO-adjacent gems. The fabulous Plan, and the just plain lovely piano piece, West. The reissue is really superb – beautifully done, with not 1, but 2 gatefold inserts and an obi-strip – you know how much I like an obi-strip! Furthermore, the original album artwork is lovely, using a drawing by the artist Joseph Beuys called A. de Campos Rosado. Very Balearic. 

Anna Domino – Caught – Les Disques Du Crepuscule 1986

It’s always worth taking a punt on a record if it’s on the Les Disques Du Crepuscule label. This Belgian imprint is host to some weird and wonderful music, much of which defies genre categorisation. I came across this record in the early noughties and had already succumbed to the charms of Anna Domino, and her cracking collaboration with Luc Van Acker, the very Balearic Zanna, so there was no chance that I was leaving this behind without investigating… and I’m so glad I did. The track Caught is an utterly sublime, beguiling, beautiful piece of music, and it is also Uber-Balearic! A dreamy, floaty, Café del Mar-style stunner, although I have no idea if Jose Padilla ever played it at the Café if truth be told. It sounds like it was made for his sunset sessions. I included the track on the Cosmic Alphonsus Vol.7 mix CD that I pressed up in 2007, but sneakily didn’t include a track-list. Hey! If It’s good enough for Harvey…

Anyway, it’s totally gorgeous, so track it down. It’s not expensive, and the LP is a right interesting kettle of fish too. Produced by Alan Rankine of The Associates, and in part by Placebo’s Marc Moulin, with Telex’s Dan Lacksman programming the Fairlight, there is a lot of amazing music here, including a cover version of Smokey Robinson’s The Hunter Gets Captured By The Game which draws some inspiration from the Grace Jones’ version and is rather boss. This a fabulous record, that I hadn’t played in a few years. It was lovely to play it again on Friday’s show.

Cantoma – Out Of Town – Leng Records 2010 / 2014

I dug this out to play on the last show as I needed something to follow a very beautiful, light, and breezy Brazilian record, and the track, Viusu, from this album immediately sprung to mind. With its gentle, almost folk guitar motif, combined with the loveliest vocals from Swedish singer Suad Khalifa, this might be my favourite track on Out Of Town. It’s simply stunning.

I hadn’t played the album in a couple of years, and now I can’t stop listening to it again and again. Cantoma is, as I’m sure you are well aware, the nom-de-plume of possibly the most Balearic man on planet Earth, Mr Phil Mison. I’ve been lucky enough to be able to call this most excellent Essex bloke a friend for almost 30 years – 29 to be exact – after we were introduced by our mutual friend Graeme Fisher at the Café del Mar in summer 1994. Phil was enjoying his second summer in Ibiza as Jose Padilla’s alternate at the Caff, and it’s odd that our paths hadn’t crossed prior to this, as he’d already been a resident DJ at Nicky Holloway’s Milk Bar, a London venue that we LuvDups seemed to frequent an awful lot in the early `90s. I was staying with Graeme in Jose Padilla’s apartment near the Café del Mar, and we’d both run down to catch what would be my first sunset experience at there, when Graeme introduced us. Aside from a quick “Hi”, the first words Phil ever said to me were “Nice sunset.” Phil’s work as Cantoma began at the start of the new millennium, with some excellent releases on Kenneth Bager’s then new label, Music For Dreams. Phil and Kenneth had been friends since meeting in Ibiza when Phil was Cafe del Mar resident, but Kenneth had been coming to Ibiza since around ’81 and was steeped in the island’s musical history. 

The first, self-titled Cantoma album appeared on MFD in 2003, with Phil taking his own good mystical time before releasing the follow-up, Out Of Town, on Claremont 56 subsidiary Leng in 2010. Originally released on CD only, as the musical landscape was somewhat different then, it wouldn’t get a proper vinyl release until 2014, which meant that I had to get my head around DJing with CDs! From his very first releases as Cantoma, Phil set the standard for a whole wave of new artists and labels who were influenced by the ‘Balearic Sound’, whatever the fuck that actually is. While the debut album encompassed electronica, ambient, soundtracks, Brazilian and Latin music, dub, acid house, Afro-beat and everything else you could think of, on Out Of Town Phil really perfects this musical melting pot. 

The album moves from glorious, ecstatic dancefloor numbers, like the openers Maja and Gambarra, with the former’s dramatic violin parts and the latter’s sumptuous Brazilian vocals, through to delicate neo-classical pieces, with the closing Trees Of Highwood being another highlight. This is as close as Phil gets to joining the Penguin Café Orchestra, with haunting strings from Robin Lee, of Faze Action fame, and Roxy Rawson.

On every listen a different track will jump out as your new favourite. It’s just completely flawless from start to finish. Today Only People is blowing my mind, with it’s beautiful, muted trumpet refrain from Alex Bonney and gorgeous vocal parts from Wunmi, a UK singer with Nigerian heritage. The cover art, by London-based artist James Joyce, is also quite magnificent. Why were there no prints made? If you want to get your head around the whole ‘Balearic’ thing, this album has to be near the top of your listening pile. It’s beautiful.

Sergio Mendes and the New Brazil ’77 – The Real Thing – Elektra 1977

There’s not a lot to say about this record, except that it’s fantastic, and if you don’t already own a copy, try and rectify that immediately. Written by Stevie Wonder during a creative hot streak so phenomenal that even his farts, although never recorded by the musical genius, could have gone platinum. Sergio Mendes and friends turn in a superb, beautiful, ecstatic, melodic, and just plain gorgeous version, of what’s an undeniably great song. It’s Latin infused disco, which makes it absurdly Balearic. Music made for dancing in open air discotheques, on balmy, summer nights, under a blanket of stars.

The Real Thing was a “Larry Levan List” discovery of mine, made in the late 1990s, when it was fairly easy and cheap to find the album. However, this 12” version used to be murder to get hold of. At just under 6 minutes, it’s considerably longer than the 7” version, and therefore the one you really need as a DJ. An official Japanese reissue in 2004, and a shoddy US bootleg mean that the price has come down a fair bit now. Plus, if you’re less afflicted than I am, you could probably just get it digitally – but where’s the fun in that! The 12” looks great and sounds even better – a beautiful clear and loud pressing with a lovely picture sleeve. The record was released in 1977, the same year as Star Wars. Sergio was more than familiar with one of the film’s cast, since Harrison Ford helped build his studio. 

For more from Balearic Mike you can find him on both Facebook and Instagram – @balearicmike. 

Mike has a Mixcloud page packed with magnificent, magical, music, and you can catch him live on 1BTN, from 12 noon until 2 (UK time) every 1st and 3rd Friday.

You can also check out the super silk screen prints of “Balearic Wife” over at @jo_lambert_print