100 Greatest Songs of the 00’s #64 The Egg – Venice Beach

Released: 2004

There were organic aspects to the vast circus tent that was chillout and there were some less so. Ostensibly it roots were in the Cafe Del Mar scene and the hippie comedown soundtrack pioneered in part by The Orb‘s Alex Paterson, former Killing Joke bassist turned producer Youth and the KLF. Like some giant amorphous blob (which in effect is what it was) throughout the nineties it then absorbed soul, jazz, funk, hip-hop, techno and anything else that stood in it’s way, until the form became so ubiquitous it was even explored in CD’s given away with Britain’s legendarily straight tabloids.

A collective based in Oxford, as if to sum up the general confusion surrounding what labels to apply to whom and where, The Observer described The Egg as “Like New Order floating on a cloud.” Their music started out as a grab-bag of various contemporary strands, from Gallic funk to dreamy System 7-esque IDM, but it took an evolutionary leap on 2004’s Forward, a release on which for the first time the players seemed to have a consistent vision.

Venice Beach was it’s apotheosis, a lustrous aural haze that made perfect use of Jerry Bewley’s slide guitar, in itself either an echo or if you like a precursor to the epic Western electronica of The Dead Texan. Here then was one final destination for a genre that had long been unable to categorise itself; the sound of atmospheric cloud-topping removed from all of it’s sources, but so perfectly expressed the nothingness it was made of had a weight all of it’s own.