When you’re whiling away the hours on a long hot Ibiza summer day by the pool or on the beach, relaxing or replenishing your energies for an equally long hot summer night, it’s nice to have the right music to mellow out to and something Ibiza-related to read. We invited two of our DJ friends to create some Ibiza summer beach and poolside playlists for you (and us) and have a couple of excellent book suggestions for you.
Wonderfully named Be.lanuit – be the night – is a DJ, music-maker and producer. He first came to Ibiza in 1988 as a 14-year-old to visit his uncle who was working at Pasha. By then, Be was already a DJ. ‘I fell in love with the island and its energy,’ he told me. ‘Now I live here full time.’
Be.lanuit describes himself as ‘a man who loves art in all of it expressions. I’m a restless person who tries to materialise what goes through his mind connected to any kind of creativity.’ This freedom of expression applies to his music.
‘I don’t have a direction when it comes to making music or DJing,’ he says. ‘I do what inspires me in the moment.’
Although it’s now a global genre, Balearic music feels like it’s evolved specifically as a soundtrack for those long hot Ibiza summer days and nights. Be describes Balearic as ‘the sounds that represent the island. The colours, nature, the sea, the aromas. It also reflects the people that lived here and their legacy.’
Of his own music, he says, ‘it has a lot of world music influences but, of course, the island of Ibiza and Balearic music is always present in my productions and DJing.’
Check out Be.lanuit’s music here. I’m a big fan of Nebulosa, his latest release.
Be has also shared this excellent playlist featuring some of the cream of Balearic artists with us.
Whenever I talk to people who had the great fortune to grow up on Ibiza like Jason Watson Todd or Hjordis Fogelberg, author of probably the best guide to Ibiza and Formentera, I wish I’d been around when the island was truly wild.
The story of Hoax by Clifford Irving begins in Ibiza in the early 1970s.
Hoax is not just an astonishing story. It gives a real insight into what life was like in Ibiza when pranksters like Irving and master art forger Elmyr de Hory, who Irving wrote about, strolled the shady streets of the Dalt Vila.
To give you a flavour of Irving’s undying chutzpah, when, in later life, he was asked why he perpetrated the hoax his book recounts, Irving pointed journalists to the book’s epigraph.
This, by Jean le Malchanceux, begins ‘You may look for motive in an act, but only after the act has been committed.’
In 2007, Irving admitted that he’d invented Jean le Malchanceux.
If you want to understand how Ibiza club culture came to be what it is today, I’d absolutely recommend Shadows Across the Moon by Helen Donlan.
The book places the culture and the music in the context of Ibiza’s ancient history and does a superb job of explaining how club culture and the Balearic sound developed. Helen lived on the island for some time and the book reflects her deep love of Ibiza.
Shadows Across the Moon is available on Kindle. Its publishers, Jawbone Press, have also created a fantastic playlist of Ibiza-related music from the 1950s onwards.
I hope you enjoy your Ibiza summer. Don’t forget if you’d like to talk to us about finding your own home on Ibiza or renting somewhere special, you can always get in touch.
General / Press enquiries : hello@charlesmarlowibiza.com or : 0034 971 459 504
Sales : charlie@charlesmarlowibiza.com
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