Adios Padilla
Farewell to one of the authors of my consciousness, the great Spanish disc jockey José Padilla. The godfather of chillout and the creator of the Café del Mar sound, which he invented during his sunset stands at the eponymous Ibiza club, Padilla had a knack for finding and making music that was soothing but not dull, celebratory but not manic, engaging but never oppressive.
His work environment
His music always had a peculiarly positive effect on me, almost a re-programming. Here is a flight of fancy from 2004:
Of course, I’ve never been to Ibiza, and a friend of mine who had been there thought it hilarious that someone would consider it a good place to read Financial Times. But, ironically, it was Financial Times that brought me the news today of Padilla’s passing. So perhaps I was not the only person sitting in front of a Bloomberg machine in those days, imagining what it would be like to live in his world.
The article says that when he came to Ibiza,
his first impression of the “White Island”…was rhapsodic: “Freedom, absolute freedom.”
He made the most of it. Like the Beach Boys his music was accompanied by a dream of a kind of life, untroubled by work schedules or task lists, governed by the rhythms of sun and sea, an evening at the beach with friends that might go on forever.
Detail from the cover of Cafe del Mar Vol. 6, 1999 (link)
It’s been 20 years since his last collection for Café del Mar. I think of the young people who gathered to listen in those days, and wonder how many of them have had a happier summer? Have there been better times in their lives? Could there have been? We’re competing with a dream, after all.
Padilla started sharing mixtapes in 1991 (here is one that is supposedly the first - it is superb in any case). In 1994 he made a compilation CD of his Café del Mar tunes and sold 8,000 copies. The second sold 30,000, the third half a million. Soon Café del Mar was global - so global that even financial analysts in California were buying its compilations. Although he disliked and regretted the over-commercialization of Ibiza, it is hard to work up too much animus when you look at the comments sections of the songs he selected and mixed, and see praises in seven languages:
Yes there were lush strings and some of the songs he featured were just short of soporific. But Padilla didn’t mind challenging his audience a little, either. According to Financial Times,
A club owner once threatened to break his “penguin” record when he insisted on playing a song by the Penguin Cafe Orchestra, a quirky avant-pop band, “because everyone left the floor every time I played it. I loved it.”
He mixed in uptempo tunes, dissonant stuff, and music that was just…unusual. The tone was chill, but the effect he was aiming for was not a blissful trance, but a kind of clarity. He wasn’t trying to put you to sleep, he was trying to calm you down a little so you could wake up:
It is nice, at this late hour, to see some critical respect for Padilla. Over the years many have hand-waved his work as trite easy listening. Even the sympathetic Financial Times piece compares him to Mantovani, before acknowledging that he found “a deeper groove.” Yes he did. His aesthetic was exacting and distinctive. He knew what he was about, and more often than not the results were beautiful, even restorative. There have been times in my life when Padilla’s music was indispensable to me, as necessary and vital as oxygen.