Eddie Rockerz VibeZ

Sixty-five tracks and the longest volume in the series — and the one most interested in singers who had not yet been discovered. Chilled Soul Vol. 10 The tenth volume is the point at which the series stops being a personal mixtape and starts behaving like an A&R department. Sixty-five tracks, assembled around 2018, and an unusually high proportion of them by artists who were either unsigned or on their first release. Several have since become significant, and a few have vanished entirely, which is exactly what an honest snapshot of a moment looks like. What to listen for WILLOW and SZA's "9" is the most prescient pairing here — both artists were at very different points in their visibility and the track treats them as equals. Jorja Smith's "February 3rd" is early and essential, and Lianne La Havas's "Empty" recorded in Paris is the best vocal performance on the list. JP Cooper's BBC session reading of "Ex-Factor...

Fourteen tracks from a band that was dismissed as a disco act and has turned out to be one of the most important groups in the history of recorded music. CHIC CHIC were not a studio project with session players; they were a band, and that distinction explains everything. Nile Rodgers on guitar and Bernard Edwards on bass had played jazz and rock before they played anything danceable, Tony Thompson was one of the great rock drummers of the era, and Alfa Anderson and Luci Martin sang the parts rather than merely delivering them. Rodgers and Edwards worked to a principle they called Deep Hidden Meaning — the idea that every record needed a concept underneath the groove, something being said that was not the same as the words. It is why their catalogue survives when so much disco does not: the songs are about something. The band's commercial life was brutally short. The backlash against disco in 1979 made the name unsellable almost overnight, and both men spent...

Sixty records that never got the radio play they deserved. The title is a complaint and the playlist is the evidence. Underlooked / Underplayed / Undercharted This is the companion piece to the Unheralded set, and it makes a slightly different argument. Where that one collected artists who were unknown, this one collects records that were available, professionally released, often by artists with real careers — and simply did not get played. The reason matters. By the late 2010s American R&B radio had narrowed to a very small number of formats, and a great deal of excellent music fell outside all of them. This playlist is what that music sounds like. What to listen for Sabrina Claudio appears four times, which makes the point efficiently: a singer with a completely distinctive sound and almost no radio presence. Cleo Sol's "Why Don't You" is the most important inclusion in hindsight. At the time she was a little-known British singer; she has since ...

Nine tracks from a Colombian-American singer who has spent her career refusing to pick a genre, a language or a decade. Kali Uchis Karly-Marina Loaiza grew up between Virginia and Pereira, Colombia, and that split is the organising fact of her music. She sings in English and Spanish, sometimes in the same verse, and her records draw on doo-wop, bolero, reggaeton, psychedelic soul and trap without ever settling into any of them. What holds it together is a consistent aesthetic rather than a consistent sound: a deliberately retro, slightly lurid glamour, and a voice that is small, high and used with real precision. She writes about money, ambition and self-possession far more than about romance, which makes her lyrics considerably tougher than the sweetness of the production implies. She also made the rare move of building a Spanish-language career in parallel rather than as an afterthought, and it worked. What to listen for "After The Storm" with Tyler, The Cre...

Ninety-five records in tribute to the radio host who invented an entire format by accident, at the age of twenty, on a station that had nothing else to play.   The Original Quiet Storm: a tribute to Melvin Lindsey Melvin Lindsey was a student intern at WHUR , Howard University's radio station in Washington DC, when in 1976 he was asked to fill an evening shift at short notice. He played slow records — soul ballads, jazz-inflected pop, quiet album tracks — and the show, named after a Smokey Robinson song, became the most influential programming idea in Black American radio. Within a decade, stations across the United States had a Quiet Storm slot. The format is now so established that people assume it was always a genre. It was not: it was one young man's late-night record selection. Lindsey died in 1992, aged thirty-six. A ninety-five track tribute is the appropriate scale, because the format was always about duration rather than highlights. What to listen for...