BEATS OF LOVE 

134. Gypsy Soul by Tommy Bolin

AFTER A brutal stretch, I needed to hear some warm, mellow, soothing grooves. This always makes me nostalgic as I reflect on my own golden era.

I successfully resisted the internet until 2007, fully aware it would supercharge my record-collecting obsession. Then, the Open University bought me a computer. Soon after, Psychemagik, Moonboots, and Lexx dropped a series of mind-blowing mixes. Before long, communities like Aficionado, Melting Point, Red Light Records, and Is It Balearic? emerged, unleashing a flood of game changing slow burners.

Pretty sure this slow burning fire was a Melting Point post. This great record I'd hitherto avoided as Deep Purple crossed that line. That line where my eclectic taste morphed into musical snobbery. That line that I now realise chalked out my own musical ignorance. I now let no stone go unturned when lending my ear, coz Bolin plays his acoustic with an understated drama that makes this flickeringly beautiful winter warmer so damned memorable. It was actually a toss up between this and the mighty Alexis, an earlier tune he wrote which is also brilliant, but the hot flamenco lead outro break sort of won it. 

Yeah, it has been a brutal stretch where I've had to compromise to stay in employment. Thank God I have this warm, mellow and soothing tune playing on the stereo. 

BEATS OF LOVE 

133. Gift From "La Mer" by Hajime Mizoguchi

THE ENIGMATIC Arthur Russell is the reason we all love a cellist. His recent reissues are a wow, go buy! 

Fellow cellist Hajime Mizoguchi employed everything but his cello when creating the cuts on his debut album. Halfinch Dessert only uses it to add in colour and depth. Reminiscent of Basquiat, whose found material became both an alternative canvas and an integral part of his early work.

Mizoguchi, like Russell, had non-classical alliances. Notably Seigen Ono of Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence fame, besides advertising industry experience. Prompting Diego Olivas to note, “Hajime loved to make music that was contemporary and accessible, but in a way his music had a lot of ruminative and big-hearted romantic melancholy that one would shake off making purely technically-proficient music.”

This move away from sheet music towards more abstracted imagery was liberating as it embraced a digital technology that still sounds so now, like this understated beauty, that floats along on a soft cushion of airy percussion. Sounds he created to induce sleep following a serious road accident that left him in severe pain with whiplash. (Cheers, Diego, again.)

Sounds that decades later still soothe troubled souls like mine with its masked complexity and warm energy. I'm halfway to dreamland.