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review by Bill Binkelman This is one schizoid album, as well as also being yet another crass attempt by the folks at RCA/BMG to further plunder the extensive back catalog of the various artist/label acquisitions done when BMG acquired Windham Hill and started buying other labels, like Private Music. Okay, that's enough politicking on my part, let's get one other fact out of the way, too. This is not chill out music, or at least not by any accepted definition that I'm aware of. To subtitle this CD (as it reads on the front cover) "30 Essential Tracks from the Original Chill Out Label" is a farce. Windham Hill is no more of a chill out label than Warp or Astralwerks is a new age music label. Now, on to the music - Windham Hill Chill is a two-CD set and, as I stated earlier, this is one schizoid collection. One half is excellent and one half is a jumbled mess. The first disc, subtitled "Ambient" is neither ambient nor cohesive. It also is partly comprised of artists who are not "true" Windham Hill signed acts (most were folded into the label through the aforementioned acquisition by BMG), e.g. Yanni, Tangerine Dream, and Patrick O'Hearn. As if that wasn't bad enough on the surface, none of the above artists sounds anything like the renowned WH "sound" pioneered by founder Will Ackerman, as well as early stars on the label like Michael Hedges, George Winston and Alex De Grassi. And to top it off, the track selection and ordering of the first disc is at best a mystery (Shadowfax is an ambient group?) or, at worst, a total mess. While some of the songs are fine on their merits (such as O'Hearn's "Malevolent Landscape," Mark Isham's "Raffles in Rio," and Oystein Sevag's "The Door Is Open") other songs are hopelessly misplaced in any "ambient" context or are just not that great to begin with, such as Ravi Shankar's "Ragas in Minor Scale," or Yanni's "To the One Who Knows." As bad as the first disc is, so the second disc is good to the same degree. This CD is subtitled "Acoustic" and it is much closer to the aesthetic envisioned by Ackerman when he founded the label in the 1980s. Not surprisingly, this disc contains many of the artists who are instantly associated with the "real" Windham Hill motif: Hedges, Winston, De Grassi, Nightnoise, Philip Aaberg, Liz Story and Ackerman himself. There are others here as well that I am unfamiliar with, but whose music is a perfect fit with those with whom I am acquainted. As horrific and jumbled as the first disc is, the sequencing and selection of the songs on the second one is a near perfect continuous flow of gentle yet varied acoustic instrumentals. Standouts include Hedges' trademark "Rickover's Dream," Winston's "Cloudburst," De Grassi's "Western," "The Dream of Taliesin" (a simply stunning Celtic number by Jeff Johnson and Brian Dunning), "Shella's Pictures" from Ackerman, Sean Harkness' gentle uptempo "Coming Home," and Nightnoise's "Night In That Land." So, here is your conundrum, dear reader. Are you willing to part with your hard-earned cash for one-half of a great two-CD set? Putting aside my disgust at the marketing angles being played by the suits at BMG, the fact remains that the "acoustic" disc of this set is wonderful. It's one of the better collection of acoustic instrumentals you'll ever hear, I'd wager. As for disc one, well, that's why they invented programmable CD players, I suppose. |
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