great compilation deserves to be cut at 45rpm on as many slabs of 10"/12" pvc as must beENB..//

I had this compilation lying down on a shelf for a number of years, all until recent collection clean-up forced me to listen some of stuff i had but never played. What a pleasant surprise it was. There are a couple of famous artists and some really really good tunes in here. Starting with Max Maxwell's guitar driven "Gypsy", a solid downtempo beat and some pitched gypsy vocals this track does it for me pretty well. But it gets deeper further on. Probably the best track here, Shakatura's "Lucid Dreaming" has that utopian psychill vibe that really puts a smile on your face and make you want to relax at a chill stage on some festival surrounded by smiling people, colors and incenses of all kinds... Beautiful! The middle part of CD is not so authentic as the beginning, but Pitch Black's "Unadrumma" is also solid piece of psy-dub. My favorite part starts with track 6 "Third Eye": lovely aquatic chords, swirling melodies and haunting shamanistic voices - a perfect combination. "The Birth After Death" is my second favorite on this CD, with its soothing chord work, gated female vocals and scratchy breakbeats, really unique sound, really chilling but also danceable, very nice work! Track 8 "Eventide" approached more seriously with jazz pianos, acidic bassline and 808 drum beats, really an enjoyable piece. Irina Mikhailova closes the compilation with "1000 Pieces", a tune with catchy acidic melody and lines, beautifully sung and arranged. All in all, it's a nice soundtrack for a late afternoon chill, not too striking or too slow, not innovative or retroactive, its just a very nice chill out album.

San Francisco's Ceiba Records offers us a nice little chill collection here. As many people have realized most chill releases seem to either be completely ambient or lean a hair towards the trip-hop side of things. Miditation 2 seems to fall into the later category. Indeed this comp reminds me a bit of Matsuri's Excerpts From Chillspace in its general vibe. Max Maxwell starts us off with Gypsy Rmx, easily the highlight of this track is the guitar work. Most electronic music's use of guitars is (speaking as a guitarist) rather lame. Either they are chunking away on a two chord metal riff, filling in with some random 2 or 3 note line played rather poorly and soaked in echo, or the occasional solo that is half baked and, while well intentioned, beyond the skill of the performer. Infected Mushroom are one of the few acts that have managed to avoid the "bad" guitar trap regularly with some solid guitar work. Gypsy Rmx is another. while the guitar parts ARE soaking in echo, the playing itself is solid and there is a lot more going on here than simply one or two samples being repeated over and over. Nice stuff and a promising start to this comp. Lucid Dreaming by Shakatura is next and is a nice slow, vaguely break tinged downtempo number I could, again, easily see on a Masturi comp several years ago. Not an amazingly wonderfully new groundbreaker (that hasn't happened much since Shpongle came on the scene), but still nice. David Battenfield jumps out of the gate and pushes all the right buttons with me with his Sonic Ghazal. Gated swirling lines and voices, some tribal percussion, some acidy lines, it even has a four to the floor kick, albeit a slow one. For DJs this is a great transition track from downtempo to more full on music or vice versa. Its also just good listening. Good stuff here boys and girls. Pitch Black offers us Unadunna. We start off with some pads and some lazy bouncing lead-ish lines dripping with echo slowly working in. The bass and a shaker come in perhaps a little too abruptly for me on the first listen, but not too badly. The rhythm section comes in with some random hits soaked in delay and some breaky beats that remind me of downtempo DnB in a way. Towards the end the DnB factor comes a little more to the foreground, but as a former DnB head, this doesn't bother me in the least. I like the vibe overall here a lot. Ceiba owner Kobe IV teams up with Ara to give us Fall Into My Heart. We start off with some more guitar bits and quick flybys of some other traditional instruments. The beat works in fairly quickly and following soon behind are some heavily processed vocals. They are we performed and all, but for some reason the track isn't really doing it for me. Its not bad by any means, but its just not striking a chord in me. Third Eye by Tom Van Draft follows. This track reminds me a bit of the Shakatura track in that its good, it has a vaguely Matsuri chill vibe about it, but I honestly can't recall any particularly distinguishing thing about the track when its over. Basically one could say its high quality filler if nothing else. It doesn't stand out, but it doesn't hurt anything either. Pridon's The Birth After Death is next up. There are some nice gated voices, and such here. The drums seem straight from an early techno Roland drum machine which gives the track a bit of retro feel, further enhanced by some record scratching and some classic low sine-bass drops. All in all this track seems like it shouldn't work or should feel way to dated, but yet for some reason it does work. Again, nothing amazing, but still a nice listen. Saros is next up with Eventide. Again we have a track that is a bit non-descript, but still solid. There is some slow (this is downtempo after all) moving development, but, yet again, nothing particularly sticks in mind once the track is finished. Again, quality filler. 1000 Pieces closes us off here with some almost Pink Floyd - Animal's sounding synth work. Here well have some more featured vocals, but in this case the vocals fit the track perfectly. Some downtempo DnB bits come in later and all and all the evolution of the track is very nice. A great way to close off the album. The end result - Miditation 2 offers us a couple of excellent tracks, a few more very good tracks and a couple of filler tracks, but even those are of significant quality, so all and all this is a very nice compilation for lovers of the downtempo side of thing. Maybe not the greatest chill comp ever, but something that will get played fairly regularly. 6.5/10