Shakatura - Ceiba

Classy chillout from San Francisco, and the music is every bit as wonderful as the city itself. Shakatura reflects the tolerant, open-minded worldview of the city’s inhabitants, and it retains a kind of one-foot-in-the-sixties electronic-hippy vibe which is irrisesistable. Trance, Dub and Trip Hop fuse to create an intelligent and rewarding chillout album. Geko is wonderful, with its mesmerising pads and a rambling Garcia-like guitar loop. Parachute is an adorable mixed bag of evercanging sound and melody, escalating into a short-lived but heavenly climax what’ll blow you away. Some points on the album are better than others, but it is never predictable and always retains a hard-to-pin-down fluidity that makes it an addictive little CD. The whole package is a closed eyelids, incense burning, hammock rocking experience and a true testment to the scene’s global appeal. Love it.