Chillen

Nobody's quite sure what genre Chillen belongs to, and that's the appeal. The German station floats somewhere between downtempo, ambient, and the softer end of dub techno, the kind of stuff that sounds like Basic Channel played at half speed. There's no shouting here. No ad breaks yelling at you about car insurance either, or at least not many. What you get is a steady, low-slung stream that treats silence as part of the arrangement. Some blocks drift too far into wallpaper territory (four minutes of pad swells and nothing else). Then a track lands with actual weight, and you remember why this…