- Album
- Big Calm
- Artist
- Morcheeba
- Release Date
- March 16, 1998
Big Calm [discogs.com] by Morcheeba [discogs.com], is a “fish store album”. It’s one of a handful of albums that I associate with zen and the art of cleaning fish tanks. I spent many hours listening to Big Calm while scraping algae off the insides of aquariums with a razor blade, and siphoning dirt —mostly fish poop— from the rock and crushed coral at the bottom of about 4,000 gallons of fish tanks. For most of 1998 and 1999 I spent many hours every week cleaning tanks at the fish store. Sometimes I even sold some fish, or coral while Big Calm played in the background.
There was always music at the fish store. There was way more hi-fi audio equipment than should be in a fish store. There was a pair of NHT 1.5 speakers connected to an Adcom CD player and amp. The CD player and amp were in the “pump room”, where the big filters for the coral tanks were, slowly being covered outside, and no doubt inside, by salt crust. There was a small pile of CDs that we cycled through; Cibo Matto‘s [discogs.com] Stereo Type A [discogs.com], Soul Coughing‘s [discogs.com] Ruby Vroom [discogs.com], the Beastie Boys‘ [discogs.com] Check Your Head [discogs.com], Ben Folds Five‘s [discogs.com] Whatever and Ever Amen [discogs.com]. I still have all of these CDs, but Big Calm is the one that gets the most play, followed by Check Your Head.
Big Calm was the first trip hop album I ever heard. It’s less heavy, less dark than Massive Attack‘s [discogs.com] Mezzanine [discogs.com] which came out just a couple of weeks later. Mezzanine is much more famous and, I would agree it’s the superior album. So why is Mezzanine not going to make my list of favorite albums while Big Calm is?
Basically it comes down to the fish store. The familiarity of Big Calm, hour upon hour of background music that is forever wrapped up with that feeling of zen while scraping algae off the tanks, feeding the fish, adding trace elements to the coral tanks, putting away fish, coral and plants on delivery days. Big Calm is part of an era of my life in a way that Mezzanine is not. So I keep going back to Big Calm when I want some beats.
Big Calm has a lot of do with my love of lofi style music, trip-hop, acid jazz and similar genre. A natural progression from the instrumental version of ATLiens [confusion.cc] and leading to DJ Shadow (who has yet to make a direct appearance on this list but will, when I get around to it), J Dilla, and more.
Want to listen? Here is the album on Apple Music:
or on Spotify: