Balearic Breakfast: Volume 1

When the Balearic ethos emerged in the early 80s, it wasn’t the first DJing style to blend the coolest soul and dance of its time with experimental music, chillout and global beats, all with a psychedelic atmosphere. Indeed, David Mancuso, in his Loft parties, had been doing something similar in New York for over a decade before. So there’s a nice resonance in Colleen ‘Cosmo’ Murphy — who cut her musical teeth as part of the Loft team from the early 90s — latterly bringing the streams together in her Balearic Breakfast Show on the sadly-missed Worldwide FM. This 2022 compilation is all pretty modern stuff and leans significantly more towards house and disco than the average “Balearic” selection — with Phil Asher remixing P’Taah, Ashley Beedle doing the same for Lady Blackbird, and Murphy herself reworking Australian jazz-fusioneers Mildlife. But there’s plenty of the washes of chillout dreaminess, krautrock chug and other sounds that you’d more associate with The B-Word, and altogether it feels like a very natural dovetailing of Ibiza with New York, London and other global dance spaces.