Continuing yesterday’s topic of Grunge Mortis Post Alternia (!), another brief obsession was chillout, downtempo, and balearic music. It all started with the soundtrack for The Warrior and The Pricess, Tom Tykwer’s superb follow up to Run Lola Run. That soundtrack had a few artists I quite enjoyed, so I looked around for anything having that type of vibe, that mixture of laidback atmospheres with shushed vocals.

Café del Mar compilations were a good place to start. I bought Volumes 5 to 8 on a whim, as they were on sale and I could afford to do so since I had a job, a proper one, since February of 2001. So on that day in August of 2001, I tore the shrink wrapping -I had my method- and devoured all four albums. I think volume 8 was my fave, as it had Lamb’s Gabriel, a song that is brutally heart wrenching.

Volume 7, however, seems to be the one I return to the most, so many decades after. Lux is a gentle album opener, so spacious and dreamlike. Afterlife has more of an urgent pace, but still soothes over. I didn’t know what to make of the remix of Bush’s Letting the cables sleep, as that song had an extra layer of hurt. Me and my stupid love life, I guess.

I don’t have to tell you that Fall and Winter of 2001 were brutal, we’re constantly reminded about it. I lost that job I had and I actually considered just moving to the beach, any beach, and do odd stuff. I think Alex Garland’s novel The Beach put me into this mindset.

In january of 2002, a good friend invited me over to Cancún, to stay with his family and look around for work. I did leave my resumé in several places, but let’s face it, there aren’t that many job openings for engineering in a place like Cancún. Tried the same in Tampico later that year, to no avail.

Slow Pulse’s Riva reminds me of an afternoon I spent near Playa Tortugas. I had formal dressing, and had three job offers rejected. I was downbeat, sweating like a pig, and failing to remove a tie. The beach was empty, as it was January, so not many tourists roaming around. I remember looking around for my cd player and just listening to a couple of burned CDs I brought. Cathy Battistessa’s optimistic vocals, almost reaching a Pollyanna watermark, are the highlight of the chilled out track. It’s a perfect album closer and I kept replaying it as the sun went down. I left once night had fallen, the moon shining over the white sand. Caught a bus, the one that crawls around the tourist trap known as Zona Hotelera, and decided to treat myself with some artery clogging food at Johnny Rockets. I was slurping down the last of my peanut butter milkshake when I got a call on my cellphone. It was a friend that lived there, let’s call her Vanessa. I had the stupidest crush on her back in ’94, and went to see her to another state she moved to in ’96. She wanted to meet over for a quick chat and agreed to meet the next day by the hotel she worked at.

It’s weird, I haven’t thought about Vanessa in years and I never connected that the carefree attitude of the song reflected her. I know she’s had some hard times, relationship wise, but she was always tenacious, always strong, and I know she must be doing okay, wherever she is.

Listen to Riva, and imagine yourself on a beach, waiting for good news from life.

-Sam J. Valdés López