Join us on February 24th at Zizou for a balearic pizza session in collaboration with Grá.

A VHS tape is the perfect format to filter the end of an era, all bleed and blur and blown-out color, the image warping just enough to feel like memory. On Amnesia’s closing night in 1989, at the open-air club in Ibiza, the hedonistic outlier of Spain’s Balearic Islands in the western Mediterranean, that distortion becomes metaphor: Experience Balearic at the moment it tips from improvisation into export, from terrace experiment into global template. Someone had the foresight to record snapshots of the night.

But let’s back up. Before the export, before the superclubs, before the compilations flattened a feeling into product, Ibiza was porous and unscripted. At Amnesia in the mid-80s, the great DJ Alfredo Fiorito wasn’t chasing the pressurized tension of peaks or drops. He was vibing with the crowd across an open-air terrace that felt closer to a hang than a dance party. Alfredo and other kindred DJs let records run long enough for the air to change, then pivot into something sideways and unlikely, trusting that the crowd would follow the feeling rather than the genre.

Balearic music is indeed a feeling more than a genre, and it took shape in a place that was, for a time, gloriously unregulated. Mid-’80s Ibiza was geographically peripheral and seasonally policed, its clubs operating in whitewashed fincas with elastic closing times, stimulants at the ready and luxurious views of the sunset. Its transient, seasonal population moved in waves, sun-starved arrivals landing hungry and electric, burning through a week before heading home exhausted as another rotation touched down, refueled and ready to go.

Decades of artists, wanderers and trust-funded outcasts had already established the island as a permissive refuge, so when house music drifted in, it met an infrastructure built for sensation, with anxiety left at the gate. What mattered was heat, salt air and bass moving across stone walls, not stylistic purity.

As the scene matured, that atmosphere found a second home at Café del Mar in San Antonio, a seaside bar founded in 1980 and oriented deliberately toward the sunset. In the early 1990s, resident DJ José Padilla began shaping those dusk sessions into cohesive, downtempo arcs, selecting ambient, soft house, soul and instrumental tracks calibrated to the fading light. When the first Café del Mar compilation was released in 1994, it formalized that ritual into a global product, translating Ibiza’s horizon-facing mood into something you could take home. The terrace became a template.

Evidence of that non-dogmatic approach runs straight through the eight albums we’re featuring at this edition of Past, Present, Future at Zizou on February 24, in collaboration with Michelin-rated Gra’ and its sourdough pizza. Across five hours of dedicated listening, we’ll trace the arc from early 1980s pop-adjacent drift to modern island reflection. Below, a springboard into the balearic sound.

Art of Noise – Moments in Love

Released in 1984 on ZTT Records, “Moments in Love” was produced by Trevor Horn and built around Fairlight CMI sampling technology, which helped define the track’s spacious, synthetic texture. The piece became one of the group’s most enduring works, widely remixed and frequently cited as an early template for ambient house and chill-out culture.

Wally Badarou – Echoes

Released in 1984 on Island Records, Echoes was Wally Badarou’s debut solo album following his work with the Compass Point All Stars. The album includes “Chief Inspector,” an instrumental standout built around layered synthesizers and a restrained, syncopated groove that became a durable selection for Balearic and eclectic DJs in the mid-80s.

Sade – Stronger Than Pride

Released in 1988 on Epic Records, Stronger Than Pride was Sade’s third studio album and was recorded in the Bahamas, France and London with longtime collaborators Stuart Matthewman and Paul S. Denman. The album reached No. 3 on the US Billboard 200 and includes the single “Paradise,” which topped the US R&B chart; its restrained tempos, clean production and emphasis on mood over virtuosity came to epitomize the Balearic preference for atmosphere and emotional continuity.

Grace Jones – Living My Life (1982)

Living My Life was released in 1982 and recorded at Compass Point with the Compass Point All Stars, produced by Chris Blackwell. The album features “Pull Up to the Bumper,” co-written by Jones and built on a taut, funk-driven rhythm section whose extended club mix became one of her most enduring dance-floor staples.

Rounding out the night are Antena’s Camino del Sol, Mark Barrott’s Sketches from an Island and Wham!’s Fantastic as foundation, records that reveal how early 80s pop, bossa-tinged minimalism and UK dance-floor ambition quietly fed the Balearic imagination, alongside José Padilla’s So Many Colors as contemporary distillation. Combined, they’re albums that consciously reflect back on Ibiza’s sunset ethos while refining it for a modern listening room. The line-up again:

Art of Noise – Moments in Love (1984)
Wally Badarou – Echoes (1984)
Antena – Camino del Sol (1982)
Wham! – Fantastic (1983)
Sade – Stronger Than Pride (1988)
Grace Jones – Living My Life (1982)
Mark Barrott – Sketches from an Island (2014)
José Padilla – So Many Colors (2015)

Join us February 24 from 6 to 11 p.m. at Zizou in Los Angeles, in collaboration with Michelin-rated Gra’, for five hours of dedicated listening, sourdough pizza and a non-dogmatic return to the terrace.

Tickets are available now via dice.