VA - Virtual Dreams: Ambient Explorations In The House & Techno Age, 1993-1997 (2020)

The 50th release on Music From Memory is also the first entry in the celebrated label’s Virtual Dreams series. Virtual Dreams: Ambient Explorations In The House & Techno Age, 1993-1997 focuses on the psychedelic ambiences which soundtracked the times around the party in the mid-90s - namely getting ready, the club chillout room, and the post-dance wind-down. Unsurprisingly, listening to Virtual Dreams makes for a blissful and tripped-out listening experience. In a certain sense all of the music here is functional - it’s just that the function in question is expanding the borders of the mind through whooshing atmospherics, burbling electronics and gently pulsating beats.

Several of the artists featured here are key figures in both ambient-techno/ambient-house and the wider history of electronic music. Names like LFO and Richard H. Kirk will be familiar to anyone with an interest in Sheffield’s esteemed electronic music history. Elsewhere on the record one finds crucial output by David Moufang (aka Move D), The Primitive Painter (Jörn Elling Wuttke and Roman Flügel) and Global Communication (Tom Middleton and Mark Pritchard). These tunes are interlaced with of-the-time favourites and rare gems to create a compilation which both serves as a fine feat of musical archaeology and also helps to contextualise the Balearic, fourth-world and house tones that Music From Memory has become known for.

Music From Memory celebrate fifty releases with Virtual Dreams: Ambient Explorations In The House & Techno Age, 1993-1997, a compilation of golden-age ambient-techno from some of the masters.

Compiled by Jamie Tiller
Artwork by Vica Pacheco
Design by Steele Bonus
Liner notes by Piers Harrison