artist: Sola Rosa country of origin: New Zealand style(s): Lounge, jazz, hip hop, cinematic essential releases: Solarized (2001, Festival Mushroom) Haunted Out-Takes (2004, Festival Mushroom)

Some of the best sample-laden music is made my "real" musicians with backgrounds in live performance. They supplement their sampled sources with live playing and a musicians natural instinct for how things fit together. These two albums from gifted New Zealander Andrew Spraggon aka Sola Rosa are textbook examples. He displays a sharp ear for soundtracks, reggae, jazz, hip hop and folksy tunes, forging his records with brilliant cut-and-paste techniques and some fine playing and melodic writing.

Both albums are warm, soulful gems. Spraggon has evolved a distinctive brand of globetrotting lounge music that gets you nodding your head without compelling you feet to go anywhere fast, even if Haunted Out-takes has some harder hip hop beats and is not as soft and dreamy as Solarized. He also has real visual flair, and the "cinematic" tag often attached to his music is a fair one. Just listen to the trad jazz arrangement of the second album's "Go Underground" with its sweet clarinet melody, a luminous imaginary soundtrack to scenes of nightlife in the prohibition world of the 1920's. Or the liquid slide guitar flourishes of "Terrorgosa" evoking a seedy roadside diner against a lonely desert expense, with the ghostly atmopshere of Ennio Morricone hanging overhead. Some people simply call this hip hop music. I'll be more ambitious and call it eclectic lounge for the 21st century.

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