Balearic

Balearic, or Balearic beat, is the open-format dance music culture that emerged on the Spanish island of Ibiza in the mid-1980s, when resident DJs mixed house, electro and new wave with downtempo pop, soul, flamenco, film music and ambient instrumentals into a single sunset-to-sunrise continuum. Rather than a fixed sound, it is an ethos of eclectic selection and warm, melodic, often slowed material played for open-air terraces, later codified worldwide as chill-out and downtempo. It survives today as both a DJ philosophy and a production style, renewed by each generation of selectors who rediscover the Ibiza sets.