Ambient search – help needed

In the mid 90s – the exact date is relevant, as we’ll soon see – one of my friends gave me a mixtape. He, my cousin and I swapped records all the time: we were into the blossoming forms of electronica that the early 90s gave birth to, and every other week it seemed a new genre was spawned. Or at least, an essential new album or 12″ was released. My friend – Willie – had a CD player (neither my cousin or I did) and he had a mixer, so he could create actual mixed tapes. He spent much of his time making these for various friends: in our ways, we were all evangelists for techno, house, ambient etc. in the early(ish) days of these genres. It was the golden period of electronica.

The mixtape in question was a C90 cassette of ambient tracks: some of which I owned, some of which I knew from listening to them in his bedroom, and others I didn’t know because he kept them a little secret, which he’d tease us with by slipping them onto a mixtape but without otherwise sharing.

Some years ago I ripped a load of my remaining cassettes to mp3 so I could listen to them on my iPod, and some of his mixtapes were amongst those I ripped. They sat as files on my hard drive for ages and now and then I’d give them a listen. The sound quality was of course a bit compromised: Audacity is not a bad bit of software, but your audio file is only going to be as good as the source: in this case, a 25+ year-old cassette. So I visited various sources (iTunes, Bleep, bandcamp) to buy full versions of those tracks that I could identify (either because I knew them, or Shazam did).

However, near the end of side 1 of the mixtape in question¹ is a track which I am still – even with the full power of the internet at my fingers – unable to identify. I spent hours off and on late last summer trying to identify it, and I was (for me) pretty systematic. I knew – or assumed – the following:

• It was at least 14 minutes long
• Willie liked to generally put new music on his tapes², so the fact that other tracks included Cascade by the Future Sound of London and the version of Little Fluffy Clouds from The Orb’s Live ’93 – which I knew both dated from around October ’93 – meant the tape was made no earlier than then, and probably no later than very early 1994, and so the track – and therefore the tape – probably dated from between autumn ’93 and (say) February ’94.

Armed, therefore, with one fact and one assumption, I delved into Discogs.com, and began to build up further assumptions:

• He’d be unlikely to include multiple tracks by the same artist on a tape, so I could safely exclude anything by FSOL, Peter Gabriel, Astralasia, Banco de Gaia, The Orb or Eat Static
• I only needed to look for releases containing tracks over 14 minutes.
• Would a compilation include a 14-minute track? That’s the majority of a side of vinyl, which seemed a lot of real estate to give over to a single piece of licensed music.
• Spurious one, this, but it didn’t feel like a remix of another track.
• The type of ambient music on display was what later became termed as ethno- or tribal ambient; and I knew some of the albums and compilations he had (both the Feed Your Head, and Ambient Dub series), and the record labels he liked (too many to list, but including Guerilla, Rising High and FAX), and of them, who would be likely to have released this.
• That type of music was mostly made in England. There was of course an ambient scene in Germany – think Namlook, for example; and also the US (particularly San Francisco) – but the track didn’t sound like anything that came from those places. Although, as I still don’t know what it is or by whom, I could be wrong here.

But I searched through over a thousand releases in Discogs’s most-likely genres, from 1993 & 1994, on multiple formats (the sound quality does sound rougher than the pieces around it, so it may have come off another cassette: is the poor fidelity why Shazam draws a blank? No idea). I listened to the linked YouTube videos, and went off elsewhere to hunt down other tracks that seemed plausible candidates. And still I have no idea what this track is. A complicating factor is that Willie also made music with another friend, Damon, but I’m pretty certain it isn’t them: the production sounds far too professional. And I lost touch with both Willie and Damon a long time ago. A snippet of the track is below (it’s a minute long but very representative: like a lot of 90s ambient tracks, it goes on for a very long time without doing much): if you recognise and can identify it, please tell me what it is…

¹Entitled lmix: Source of Life and mixed by his nom de plume when DJ-ing ambient tracks, Psychic Sheep (look, it was the 90s, okay?)

²Although that theory is slightly undermind by the fact that he also included the title track of Peter Gabriel’s Passion, from the 1988 soundtrack to The Last Temptation of Christ, but no matter.