Recorded live and mixed by none other than Brian Eno, 'The Surgeon…' is one of Fourth World inaugurator Hassell's most breathtaking full-lengths, capturing the physicality of his performance and matching his lopsided trumpet work with hypnotic synths and ghostly, muted percussion. If you've not jumped into his catalog before, this is the perfect starting point!

Thievery Corporation's Eric Hilton and Rob Garza have always treated the line between acoustic and electronic music as a drunken sailor might, unpredictably falling on one side or the other with equal frequency. By this measure, The Richest Man in Babylon is their soberest effort to date, striding confidently into jazz, soul, world beat, and other styles with a direct, reverential approach. The band's last record, Sounds from the Verve Hi-Fi, featured a set of classic jazz tunes unadorned with remixes or reinterpretation. But the songs on Babylon are originals, incorporating not just jazz but Afro-beat, Brazilian dance, Persian and Indian music, reggae, and psychedelia, all while making expert use of new and old collaborators like Sleepy Wonder, Lou Lou, and Shinehead. Icelandic singer Emiliana Torrini makes an instant impression on the first track, "Heaven's Gonna Burn Your Eyes," her voice freeing the song's melody and structure with just a few hypnotic bars. It's hard to call this an electronic record at all; even their dub-influenced tracks miss a certain studio sheen, as if Hilton and Garza simply waded into a sweltering Jamaican beach party and hit record. But while it misses the ambient, ethereal edge that made The Mirror Conspiracy a downtempo classic, Babylon satisfies with organic energy and tasteful eclecticism.

Someone once said there are two ways of listening to music - with your body and with your mind. When you're hit by the groove, you're listening with your body, compelling you to dance. Engaging with the music in this way is quite different to how you'd respond to, say, Nick Drake or Billie Holiday, where the music seems to deny a physical response.
All of which is a roundabout way of trying to explain what this eternally hip Belgian pianist's album is all about. Opening with a four-to-the-floor drum and bass riff, 'Silver (Who Stole the Groove?)' uses a sample taken from the classic Blue Note album Doin' the Thing (at the Village Gate) by Horace Silver. It becomes a repeated motif as Bert Joris's trumpet, Moulin's Fender Rhodes piano and Christa Jérome's voice weave textures around the hypnotic beat…

The prolific and long-running De-Phazz (also known as DePhazz) is a contemporary lounge project led by Peter "Pit" Baumgartner, a German-Austrian producer who has surrounded himself with a shifting cast of collaborators that includes vocalists Barbara Lahr, Karl Frierson, and Pat Appleton. Beginning with Detunized Gravity (1997), Baumgartner and company have explored various forms of lounge music, much of it balancing samples with live instrumentation, with innumerable cross-sections of vintage jazz and soul, easy listening, and Latin music. By employing the sounds of classic percussion and jazz instruments such as the trumpet and sax, De Phazz successfully create smooth electro-groove music with an unmissable swinging jazz theme. De Phazz is a unique sound that you must check out.

Working many late nights in the 2500 year old Swiss town of Basel, the two artists spun a creative tapestry of nautical sounds, electronic ambiences, and solid musicianship into a beautifully crafted album of journeys in the undersea world. Wanderer of the oceans, swimming peacefully for thousands of years. Between the continental shelf and sea level he changes color and pattern at will. Chameleon of the sea, this rare and beautiful fish leads a solitary life, wandering the depths of the world of Scubason…
Zeus Faber's 1993 debut, "Scubason", provides exactly what the album's name signifies: the sound of the deep. The duo's intertwining, often poignant keyboard lines combine with samples, environmental recordings and jazzy touches of bass, guitar, sax and flute for a mellow and otherworldly effect. An accomplished and creative debut…

For a band that named itself after the first dog in outer space – and previous albums called Sounds of the Satellites and Silver Apples of the Moon – you'd think Laika would make spacey ambient music with a focus on quirky beats. And they do, sometimes. The emphasis, though, of Good Looking Blues, the London quartet's third album, is to give equal attention to Margaret Fiedler's smooth, somewhat gothic-and-soul-influenced vocals and the band's mixture of rock, slow electronic, and sit-on-your-couch dance music. Fiedler, who went to grade school with Liz Phair in Winnetka, Illinois and later played in a Smiths-sounding college band with Moby, speak-sings dark fictional stories about life's basic themes: love, sex, death, and work. But it's not quite that simple. For instance, on one of the album's standouts, "Black Cat Bone," she tells a story of a woman who kills her evil husband with voodoo: "Rocks for my pillow and sand for my bed/For better or worse, I left him for dead." Laika's talent is crafting a particular mood.

At the beginning of the 2000s, a new wave of music spilled into the cocktail bars and lounge music was born. The band DePhazz quickly became the insider tip darling of television and radio editors, who liked to put the band's retro-electronic sounds on heavy rotation among their lifestyle and news reports and thus enveloped the entire nation in an aesthetic carpet of sound. Through numerous samplers such as "Buddha Bar" or "Cafe del Mar", songs like The Mambo Craze reached the whole world.

Mister Ed (Eduardo Gomes de Bifteca) studied the recorder and specialised in classical music. In 1987 he graduated from the famous Berklee College of Music. Once moved to New York, Ed met two guys who were looking for a singer with a high voice! Together they formed the rock group Forked Tung and toured through the US and Europe. They had lots of fun but lacked success. Eventually mister Ed found work as a DJ touring US airbases. He always kept his nickname Mr. Ed. This time he earned good money and was able to buy enough gear to atart his own Mr. Ed studio. This he did in Cork, Ireland and that is where he created his first two albums: "Orange Dream" and "Ultra-Beige Dream".