Enraptured Label Compilations

"Day Dreaming (Bedroom Ambience 2)" (Album, 1999)

This second Bedroom Ambience compilation from one of the UK's best new labels is a veritable smorgasboard of tasty spacey electronic goodies. Featuring the likes of Mall, Alphastone, acceleradeck, AMP, Flowchart, Junkboy and Windy & Carl, this offers up a selection of established and new artists across nine tracks.

Enraptured (and its sub-label Endorphin) has been the most eye (ear?) catching UK-based label to emerge in the last year. A limited but steady release schedule has delivered some unexpected delights and a surprisingly homegenous sound across a wide bunch of artists. With the label's sound floating somewhere between film soundtrack ambience, trippy space rock, instrumental electronica and intelligent dance, Day Dreaming is the perfect sampler that delivers a far clearer explanation than my half-arsed attempts at pinning a musical label on this stuff will.

The superb Y2AOK by Flowchart with its echoing, low-level vocoder voices populating the desolate, sun-baked landscape created by low drone synths is the most memorable new artist and, for me, the highlight of the entire album. Newcomers Yellow 6 serve up a four-and-a-half minute distorting out of body experience on Redlight Camera, immediately followed by AMP's dramatic mellow turnaround, ICU. Meanwhile, synthesized noises of the natural world as heard through digital water fill Longstone's Water Resistance (up to a depth of 3m). The entries by Mall and Alphastone are disappointing, whilst Junkboy still need to shake their ocassional sub-Air tendancies before sounding distinctive. The impressive acceleradeck close the compilation with their twelve-minute Vietnam, ambient and suitably dream-like, but with something hauntingly serious to say too. A strong compilation and one which rewards repeated listening - either concentrated through headphones or as a calming backdrop to anyone's favourite room in the house. Certainly deserves (and is certain) to be heard outside of people's bedrooms. 8/10

Rob Dyer