Chance has thrown up another gift from Tim, two days after the last one.
I think Tim gave me this shortly after we met, round about Christmas 1994. I expect he came across it because he liked some of the other German ambient-ish stuff on the Recycle or Die label, which this is on. He was a fan of Sven Väth, who was linked to Recycle or Die.
This is another CD I used to keep in the office in the Workstation. I know that, firstly, because of the layer of grime on the digipack cover (that office never got properly cleaned!), and secondly from the almost Proustian memories that playing it brings back.
After everyone else had gone home, from about six'o'clock onwards, the working day would enter a different tempo. No phone calls or other interruptions, and fewer emails, so I could do the more concentrated writing and intellectual work that needed to be done. (This was when I was working seventy hour weeks, building the business, and even at Summer Solstice I would be going home in the dark, just in time to eat a ready meal in front of Newsnight.) I'd put a CD like this on and barely be aware of it until I noticed it had stopped. Then I'd hit play again on the remote control, to avoid the interruption of walking over to the CD player to pick a new one. One CD might get played three or four times consecutively in an evening.
This album exists somewhere in between Balinese gamelan music, hotel lounge jazz and ambient electronica. It meets the essential criteria for good ambient music: good to listen to and easy to ignore.
The Baked Bean identity is a paragon of faceless anonymity, though the album does name three composers/performers on the back. And the track titles — Heintz 1 and Has Bean — ho! ho! those Germans! Well, they've moved on from the cringe-inducing titles of Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze (Stratosfear, Trancefer, and many other similar offences); but not much.
 MusicBrainz entry for this album
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