One of late summer’s hidden highlights, The Big Chill‘s Enchanted Garden festival in deepest rural Wiltshire brought together the wild and the whimsical from the arty fringes of new-age techno-hippy culture. The atmosphere was grand, the spirit commendable, but much of the music proved a trifle anaemic.
Necessary or evil? A pleasingly small amount of knit-your-own jazz-house noodling and pan-ethnic polyrhythm patchworks. Instead, lots of superior ambient shimmering, luminous piano cascades from Harold Budd, a spectacularly unnecessary orchestral chamber music cover of The Orb‘s ‘Little Fluffy Clouds’, and oodles of summery frippery. Slight stuff, but mostly charming.