Café del Mar CalmCafé del Mar Calm

Café del Mar opened at Caló des Moro in Sant Antoni on 20 June 1980, a west-facing bar that Carlos Andrea, José Les and Ramón Guiral built so the sunset could do the programming. José Padilla arrived in 1991 and worked the hours on either side of it, which is where the quiet material lived, the ambient pieces that opened a set and the ones still running long after the light had gone. Volumen Uno put that music on a record in 1994, the label followed in 1999, and Calm is the channel that inherited that end of the catalogue.

It is the slowest of the three, sitting under Chill and House, and it holds ambient, beatless electronics, IDM at walking pace and the odd balearic piece that never quite arrives anywhere. It works in a room where people are talking and it also works on headphones at three in the morning, and hitting both of those at once is harder than it looks from outside.