Various - Mountain High 2

Candyflip Records in Greece releases mostly progressive trance, but also some chilled releases. Here they are out with the second chapter in their Mountain High series, which takes us into an ambient/dub journey by known and unknown artists.

This compilation has a really nice opening by Cell (Alexandre Scheffer) from France. He has released several really strong tracks this year, and here he delivers one of his best tracks so far. Chilled tribal vibe with a wonderful melody coming in after a while. Track 2 by Max Maxwell is allready released three (!!!) times before, such as on Com.Pact and Zulu Lounge. It’s a pretty nice track, but I just can’t see why release it a third time when there is so much good chill out music out there. Track 3 is a new track by Kick Bong, who released his debut album (A Cup Of Tea) on Ultra Vista this year. Loungy easy listening chill with a very organic vibe. Track 4, 6 and 9 is made by a Brazilian group called Linderes Band. They haven’t released much before, but here we get surprisingly three (!!) tracks by them. They follow the loungy easy listening style too. Easy digestible chill prefect for a cafe, but pretty nice tracks anyway. Track 5 is another one by Max Maxwell, also this one disappointingly released before on his album Continuous Play. Track 6 is another one by King Bong again, here with some nature sounds and mystic, dubby vibes. Track 8 is by a fresh new name from Greece, I.X.O.P. Pretty nice down tempo track, totally chilling. The last two tracks are from the Ultimae family, Aes Dana and Solar Fields. Aes Dana gives us his typical style of deep, spacey ambient with down tempo beats. One of my favourite tracks on this compilation. Solar Fields finishes the compilation with a really floating, beautiful ambient track.

In my opinion, the first chapter of Mountain High was slightly better than this. Some of the tracks become a little bit too café chill for my taste, and I was a bit dissappointed to find tracks allready released. But, you also get some really nice tracks here, such as Cell, Aes Dana and Solar Fields.

Misty mountains of Greece re-visited!

Candyflip Records from Greece is back with the long awaited follow-up to the 2003 chill-compilation Mountain High… The first one was an epic journey of high-quality chill-out – and by the looks of the track list, this one is too… Alex Candy has spent more than 18 months hand-picking these tracks and I feel pretty confident he knows what he’s doing… Let’s find out…

So – how does this compare to the first Mountain High? Hard to say, but after some hardcore thinking I’ve come to the conclusion that this isn’t better – it’s equally good… There are some tracks here that don’t exactly rub me the right way – but then again, there are also a bunch of really awesome downbeat tracks… Also the cover art here is some of the most beautiful I’ve seen in a while…

This compilation works pretty well both with and without headphones… And journey-wise I find it pretty good and varied… Lots of cross-over material here, which is a good thing! All in all, this is a solid downbeat compilation… Perhaps not essential, but still pretty damn good! A safe buy for hardened chillers though… Enjoy!

Favourites: 1(!), 3, 4(!), 5(!), 8(!), 10(!), 11