The Gentle People - Soundtracks For Living Incl. Aphex Twin Remix (3LP) [WRWTFWW]

Format: 3x12" color vinyl in 3-panel gatefold sleeve.
CAT: WRWTFWW122

WRWTFWW Records is proud to present THE GENTLE PEOPLE - Soundtracks for Living (Expanded Edition), the definitive 1997 lounge/chill out classic, reborn! Available as a limited triple white LP edition in a heavy-duty three-panel gatefold sleeve.

When The Gentle People floated in during the mid-90s on clouds of strings, sugar, and sine waves, they sounded like visitors from a more glamorous planet. Signed to Richard D. James and Grant Wilson-Claridge’s cult label Rephlex, this multinational unit of “E-Z-Core” brought the aesthetics of 50s and 60s easy listening and exotica to 90s club culture with an almost clandestine subtlety.

Soundtracks for Living was their definitive statement: an album that “takes the lounge scene and completely runs away with it… heavenly bliss,” as one contemporary review put it. Imagine The KLF’s Chill Out or Space growing up with 60s/70s French pop, bossa nova, soundtracks, vocal groups, library music, and easy listening, then running off for a night out with dub, ambient techno, and bubblegum pop. That’s Soundtracks for Living: a record that can accompany cocktail hour, a 4 AM taxi ride, or headphone reveries with equal effortless elegance.

The Gentle People—Dougee Dimensional, Laurie LeMans, Valentine Carnelian, and Honeymink—started in the early 90s in Brixton, organizing costumed theme parties before taking their audiovisual universe to the studio. For them, music was “a way of life”—soft on the ear, rich in pop hooks, and situated somewhere between playfully idiotic and hyper-intellectual. Their Rephlex debut was the single “Journey,” later blessed with a brilliant Aphex Twin remix that pushed their sugary sound even further into outer space.

This expanded edition of Soundtracks for Living finally gives this glambient lounge-pop landmark the treatment it always deserved. Carefully spread across 3LPs, it includes a brand-new remaster from the original sources, allowing every harp arpeggio, every string swell, and every analog streak to float in panoramic hi-fi. The main album is supplemented by an extra 12” of unreleased and rare material, offering a deeper dive into the Gentle world: alternative takes, lost interludes, and secret soundtracks for lives yet unlived.

Crucially, “Journey” appears here in its original form, in its Gentle instrumental version, and in the cult Aphex Twin remix, bringing the band and their labelmate together in one place, underscoring the project’s quietly radical nature: this was lounge music that could live alongside braindance, acid, and IDM and still steal the show.

Pressed on limited edition white vinyl, Soundtracks for Living (Expanded Edition) invites both long-time fans and new listeners to re-enter The Gentle People’s universe: a place of fondue parties, bubble chairs, star-lit elevators, and infinitely looping sunsets, where “the way to the stars” is never quite out of reach.

In an era that often reduces the 90s to big-room anthems and grunge guitars, Soundtracks for Living remains a subtly subversive reminder that the decade was also about imagination, camp, softness, and utopian possibility. As later writers have noted, The Gentle People weren't just a curiosity from an oddball label; they became unlikely icons for an entire loungecore moment, appearing on TV, compilations, and magazines, and proving that gentleness could be as futuristic as any drum machine.

In connection with this release, WRWTFWW has also reissued The Gentle People’s Peel Sessions, a 4-track EP of their 1997 BBC performance, available on vinyl for the first time.