On Balearic time

There is a tempo to Balearic music that has very little to do with BPM. It is the tempo of a long lunch, of a coastline at four in the afternoon, of a needle drop you weren't planning to make. The records that made the original Café del Mar tapes work weren't chosen because they fit a genre. They were chosen because they fit a time of day. Pink Floyd's "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" alongside a Manuel Göttsching loop alongside a Sade ballad — it only sounds reasonable once the sun is low enough. Twenty years into writing about this music, the lesson hasn't changed: pace matters more than style. The slowness is the point.