Start a new life

A new life in sound...

There is electronic music designed to move your feet. That sways the hips and lures you on to the dancefloor. In fact in most cases they even call it 'dance'. Then there is the kind that gets your head nodding instead. Composed to help you through the post-club comedown, more Sunday morning than Saturday night. Start a new life by Slacker is the latter; a blissfully laid-back album that can also be surprisingly funky when it wants to be.

It's one of those wonderful long players that deserves to be far better-known than it is, with tracks destined to end up in mobile phone adverts (in fact I'm pretty sure one did) or soundtracking quirky BBC documentaries rather than troubling the charts. A great shame, made more so by the fact that it was the last album made by Shem McCauley before he died in 2012.

Shem actually started out producing the foot-moving variety of electronica, both as Slacker ('Scared' was a storming mid-nineties dance monster) and as Ramp. Produced in Thailand, after an extended break from music, this album has a chilled-ness that can only come from spending time in a place with lots of beaches and lots of sunshine.

Think balearic but with a touch of asian spice: Big slow drums crash, trippy snippets of dialogue waft in and out, haunting, otherworldly tribal chants chip in occasionally and strange sounds resonate back and forth from speaker to speaker. It's awesome stuff. The track names speak volumes - 'A million dreams', 'Help me here', 'See the world', 'Come back home' - it's like a peaceful journey through the mind of a man who has explored the realms of electronica and found a great place to begin again. To start a new life, I guess...

RIP Shem, you and your music will be missed.