File under: Balearic / Chill Out / Downtempo

The story:

Balearic DJs Chris Coco and George Solar started making tunes together a couple of years ago after a chance meeting at Ibiza Sonica radio followed by some deep chats about dub and the future of chill out music.
After a string of singles they decided to make an album based (loosely) around various rhythms for the basic inspiration. George, who is also an accomplished percussionist, made a list - Nyabinghi, Guaguanco, One Drop etc - and Chris added one of their own - Algaroba.
The basic rhythm tracks were recorded in Ibiza, mostly drums and percussion, naturally, with a little added bass from Fly, who also, fortuitously, is the sign writer who made the cover image.
Various elements were added in Ibiza, Buenos Aires and London, and, after some digital wrangling an album of beautifully organic downtempo delights finally took shape.

George Solar - Witness Statement:

It’s basically all Chris Coco’s fault. And I hardly ever was happier to shift the blame than in this particular case, because turns out he was right all along (as you can hear).

When we began to collaborate a few years back (his idea as well by the way) I was still part of a really cool band of fellow Ibiza musicians (called Dubtropical). Chris particularly liked the rhythm section, so I knew we were in for some serious Coco flavoured fun at some point. And now here we go. Hopeless Island romantics that we are… probably because we can. We both happen to live on an island after all.

“Let’s just record a couple of island related rhythms” Chris said one day in his trademark british way of friendly understatement, “and we’ll figure the rest out along the way.” Easier said than done. So I compiled a list of (mostly tropical) traditional island related grooves which we broke down to the bare minimum each, and then recorded only drums & percussion as the base in more or less two days - in the studio of (and engineered by) french born, Ibiza based drummer Michael Alcaras, sometimes adding a bit of bass just as a guideline. Good thing that Chris has this plan I thought, as the potential song material piled up all around us. But it was all just rhythm.

One morning after Chris had returned to London, I woke up to an email he sent which basically said: “So: what are we going to do now?”. I think we both had to laugh at that point (haha).

Each of us grabbed a few “riddims” and ran with them towards a “demo stage”, basically adding a bit of meat to the bones of the skeleton we now had, and then mailing those back & forth in order to inspire each other. By the time I had finished two or three of those, Mr. Coco basically had the rest all figured out somehow already, and until today I wonder how he pulled that off.

Long story short: we got another bunch of talented musicians in to help us paint the full picture. Adding to Chris’ London crew (namely Nick Cornu on guitar and Samantha Whates aka Nick & Sam plus vocalist Louis Vann Johnson), we recruited the incredible Leo Silcan from Buenos Aires to contribute some masterful fairy dust (aka the traditional latin american 10 string guitar like instrument called Charango that Chris & I are both totally in love with), had Antonio Blakstad do his very special keyboard thing on “Rumba Solar”… and then guess who did all the rest? That’s right: Chris did.

Except for the cover - which was hand painted by Ian “Fly” Harper, Birmingham born and now Ibiza based professional sign painter (who also happened to play some bass and is the flugelhornist on the Coco/Solar evergreen “September On The Island” for the record/nerds).

The only thing left for me to do was to drive Chris nuts with picky mixing & arrangement details while my Ibiza summer DJ schedule already kicked off. At least that way I could testfly some of the material for assorted sunsets & beachy island situations here & there, steadily reporting back to HQ about the, well, island vibrations.

12 initial grooves, 20+ dubs/versions and almost two years down the line we finally came up with something in vinyl album format - which of course turned out to be very different from what we thought it would be in the first place. However, all we know now is that this will keep us busy for a while. Not only, but also because next we need to figure out what to do with all those versions not included on the album.

And that definitely is an island vibration: you just never know, but you try to figure it out somehow, constantly. That’s the essence of island life, I guess. It simply keeps resonating - and if you want to be compatible, so should you.