Earth/Soulfood. Downtempo music from Good Looking

Initially, the Earth label was conceived as an umbrella under which all the imaginable sounds of LTJ Bukem’s Good Looking would gather. In the morning you can be a modern drum‘n’bass musician and write an atmospheric track at 160 bpm, and later in the evening the broken rhythm slows down by half and you can now pay homage to the music of your childhood: a wild mix of funk, jazz and soul, which was relentlessly played by pirate stations in the UK. You don’t need a guest orchestra to cherish the 70s. With rare exceptions, the rich sound of Good Looking tracks is a matter of digital technology. In the documentary about his label Bukem demonstrated a magnificent module with seven thousand sounds, where all the wind instruments, strings and electric organs were already recorded and you only needed to pick them to make a collage :-)

“The reason we started the Earth series was to let our artists show that they are first and foremost musicians,” Good Looking say, “The concept of the Earth series is based on that of musical awareness and experimentation, pushing the boundaries of genre through the merging of styles to create something new. It also serves as a great foundation for the up and coming producers to gain recognition of their work. This creative environment also enables new and forthcoming artists to release their material.”

The popularity of Earth compilations, where only label exclusives were published, was so big that, as DRS rapped in Constellation track: “Popularity: high, availability: hard to find”. From a mixture of genres, Earth turned into a treasury of unhurried music—slow rhythms were held in high esteem in the second half of the nineties. Another Bukem label, Cookin’ Records, grew out of Earth with compilations like Soulfood where flirtations with nu jazz unfolded in full. This is exactly what this relaxed three-hour mix is dedicated to.