Various - Artcore 3

This is a decent collection. In other words, most of the material is pleasant, albeit somewhat forgettable.

The best track, hands down, is Ed Rush's "Skylab." It's a careful production that is dark and seductive.

But as is the case with the other Artcore releases, too many tracks on Artcore 3 try too hard to convice the listener that the "chill-out" state is transcendant.

The fact is that in most cases the strive for chilling-out your listeners results in boredom after a few listens, not to mention the fact that, as a producer, you give less attention to more timeless porduction values such as momentum, aesthetic individuality, and texture.

It's true that saxophones, synthetic strings, and bongos sound damn smooth when layered over a tinny jungle rhythm. But Jungle is a genre in which melody takes a very distant back seat to rhythm. To sum up my point, chill-out jungle provides a shallow well of ideas from which to draw. It cannot sprout more than a few dozen classic tracks, to say nothing of entire compilations.