Balearic
The 7 Best Balearic
Tracks of All Time
Not a sound so much as a permission: Alfredo Fiorito's sets at Amnesia in Ibiza put Italo, indie, dub, soft rock and African records in one night, and the British DJs who visited in 1987 took the idea home and started acid house with it.
- Origin
- Ibiza, Spain, 1987
- Tempo
- 95–125 BPM
- Also known as
- balearic beat, ibiza, amnesia sound, sunset
- Tracks
- 7
- Updated
- 2026-08-31
Listen to the whole list
Play it through here →One record after another, with the verdicts
Take 5 of 7 to YouTube → (opens in a new tab)
Opens the list on YouTube as a playlist you can save to your own account. We never see your account, and nothing is stored here. 2 of these records have no verified YouTube link yet, so they are left out rather than guessed at.
Number 1: Elkin & Nelson / Jibaro
1974
Colombian brothers recording in Spain, rediscovered by Alfredo a decade later, and remixed for the London crowd in 1988. The definitive Balearic record precisely because nothing about it was meant for a club.
Number 2: Joe Smooth / Promised Land
1987 · DJ International
Chicago house as gospel, and the record that closed Ibiza nights and then Shoom nights. Utopian in a way house rarely permits itself.
Number 3: Sueño Latino / Sueño Latino
1989 · DFC
Manuel Göttsching looped, birdsong added, nine minutes long, Italian. If one record explains what the island's DJs were doing, it is this one.
Number 4: Woodentops / Why Why Why
1988
An English indie band who found themselves adopted by a dance scene they knew nothing about. Balearic's willingness to take a guitar record on its merits, exactly as it stood.
Number 5: Nightmares on Wax / Sueño
1999 · Warp
The style outliving the island — downtempo, warm, and built for the end of the night rather than the middle of it.
Also on Twice Over, Warp
Number 6: Cosmic Baby / Loops of Infinity
1993
German, and the point where Balearic and trance briefly meet. Included because the category has always been defined by what a DJ can get away with.
Number 7: Nino Nardini / Tirami Su
1976
Library music, made to be sold to television by the yard, and rescued wholesale by the island's diggers. Nothing better illustrates the scene's indifference to provenance.