The Glorious Evolution: How ChillTravelers’ NFX Takes Chill Music Where It Was Always Meant To Go
Thirty years ago, Bob Root heard a sound that didn’t exist yet. While José Padilla was spinning his legendary sunset sets at Café del Mar, while The Orb and The KLF were inventing ambient house in London’s Heaven nightclub, while Thievery Corporation was just a glimmer in the eyes of two D.C. producers, Root was hearing something different. Something more. Something that would take three decades to manifest and another ten years to perfect.
Welcome to NFX—the album that doesn’t just honor chill music’s storied past, but catapults it into a future so bright you’ll need sunglasses at midnight.
Standing on the Shoulders of Sunset Giants
Let’s start with some respect. The chill music lineage is sacred territory, and NFX knows it. Bob Root isn’t some musical arriviste pretending the genre sprung from his forehead fully formed. He’s a student of the masters, and NFX pays homage to the pioneers who paved the way.
Think about Cody Johnson of Café Cody, who spent over twenty years live-streaming his Balearic Island sounds before moving to Spotify, creating what he called “the soundtrack to your life.” Cody’s evolution from producing live concerts with artists like Ravi Shankar and Bob Marley in California and Hawaii to discovering chill music after a transformative 2001 trip to Ibiza and Paris mirrors Root’s own journey—a slow-burning evolution toward a sound that captures life’s many moods.
Cody, who started with late-night jazz shows in Honolulu in the early 1980s and eventually created the environmental rock program Earth Tracks, understood something fundamental: music isn’t background noise. It’s atmosphere, emotion, and experience distilled into sound. His partner Robin Johnson and muse Véronique Delphine continue keeping the Café Cody spirit alive even after Cody’s passing, proving that great chill music transcends its creators.
Then there’s the modern master, DJ Maretimo—Michael Maretimo to his friends—who took the torch and ran with it into the digital age. With over 25 years of mixing experience, four distinct radio channels under Maretimo Records, 600,000 monthly listeners worldwide, and an astonishing 140 million YouTube views, Maretimo represents chill music’s evolution into the streaming era. His Lounge, Chillout, Latin, and House music specializations show how the genre expanded and diversified while maintaining its core DNA.
Maretimo earned the YouTube Play Button Silver for surpassing 100,000 followers and received a nomination for the Augsburg Media Award in 2020. His seasonal compilations—Spring Lounge, Winter Time, Beach Grooves, Maretimo Sessions—demonstrate the genre’s versatility and endless capacity for reinvention. Where José Padilla created the template, Maretimo built the empire, proving that chill music could be both commercially successful and artistically pure.
The Bloodline: From Heaven to Ibiza to Santa Fe
To understand what makes NFX so deliciously audacious, you need to understand where chill music came from. The term originated in 1989 at Heaven nightclub in London, in an area called “The White Room” where DJs Alex Paterson and Jimmy Cauty played ambient mixes from sources like Brian Eno and Pink Floyd. This gave exhausted dancers a place to recover from the faster-paced music of the main dance floor—literally, a place to “chill out.”
These weren’t background DJs playing elevator music. Paterson and Cauty were architects of experience, creating what would become known as ambient house—music that combined the atmospheric qualities of ambient with the rhythmic foundations of house. Their 1989 track “A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules from the Centre of the Ultraworld” made it to number 78 on the UK singles chart, proving that weird, wonderful, and experimental could find mainstream acceptance.
By 1990, The KLF’s album *Chill Out* had established the blueprint. Ambient house became a movement, spawning artists like 808 State, Future Sound of London, and Orbital. The Orb’s 1992 single “Blue Room”—at forty minutes, the longest single to reach the UK charts—peaked at number eight, and their album *U.F.Orb* hit number one. This wasn’t niche music anymore. It was culture.
Meanwhile, across the Mediterranean, José Padilla was writing his own chapter. Born in Barcelona in 1955, Padilla moved to Ibiza in 1975 and took up DJ residency at Café del Mar in 1991. There, bathed in Mediterranean sunsets, he created something magical: atmospheric, emotive soundscapes that turned watching the sun go down into a spiritual experience.
When Padilla compiled the first Café del Mar album in 1994, it sold millions of copies worldwide and spawned over 25 volumes. He wasn’t just making compilation albums—he was bottling the essence of Ibiza’s tranquility and selling it to a stressed-out world desperate for calm. Padilla, who passed away in October 2020 after battling colon cancer, left a legacy that transformed how we think about music’s relationship to place and moment.
Simultaneously, in Washington D.C., Rob Garza and Eric Hilton met at Hilton’s Eighteenth Street Lounge in 1995. Bonding over their love of 1960s bossa nova, they formed Thievery Corporation and released their acclaimed debut *Sounds From The Thievery Hi-Fi* in 1997. The album sold over 100,000 copies and almost cracked the Top 10 on Billboard’s Dance/Electronic Albums chart.
Thievery Corporation’s genius was their genre-blending omnivorous appetite—bossa nova, dub reggae, jazz, Latin music, electronic textures—all served with downtempo sophistication. Their 1998 single “Lebanese Blonde” became iconic (especially after appearing in the 2004 *Garden State* soundtrack), and their 2005 and 2008 albums achieved back-to-back number ones on Billboard’s Dance/Electronic chart. They released songs in Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese, and Hindi, proving that chill music could be truly global.
Neo Effects: When Evolution Becomes Revolution
This is the lineage Bob Root inherited. From Heaven’s White Room to Café del Mar’s sunsets to Thievery Corporation’s global grooves to DJ Maretimo’s modern empire—each generation expanded what chill music could be while honoring what it always was: music for the soul, not just the feet.
But here’s where NFX gets fun: Root didn’t just study this history. He absorbed it, internalized it, then asked a dangerous question: *What if we stopped apologizing for contradictions?*
Chill music has always walked a tightrope. It’s supposed to be relaxing but engaging, atmospheric but rhythmic, background but foreground. The pioneers managed this balance beautifully, but they were still operating within certain boundaries. Ambient house had its four-on-the-floor beats. Café del Mar had its sunset-appropriate selections. Thievery Corporation had its downtempo constraints.
Root looked at all of this and thought: Why choose?
Neo Effects—the genre Root created for NFX—takes every contradiction in chill music and turns it into a feature, not a bug. Aggressive yet mellow. High-energy fusion wrapped in chillout roots. Driving but relaxing. Cool European vibes meeting sleek night city moods. It’s the musical equivalent of driving a Ferrari through mountain roads while simultaneously meditating.
This isn’t fusion in the traditional sense—where you mix two ingredients and get a predictable result. This is synthesis, where contradictory elements create something entirely new. Think about track titles like “Ibiza Highway”—Root’s vision of “driving mountain roads in a Ferrari listening to melodic chill music.” That’s not background music for your coffee shop. That’s full-engagement sonic experience that demands attention while relaxing your nervous system.
The Santa Fe Synthesis: Where Desert Meets Digital
Root’s base in Santa Fe, New Mexico isn’t just geographic trivia—it’s essential to understanding NFX. While Padilla had Ibiza’s Mediterranean sunsets and Thievery Corporation had D.C.’s multicultural urban energy, Root had the high desert of New Mexico with its ancient Native American culture, Spanish colonial influences, and thriving international art scene.
Santa Fe operates as a cultural crossroads, much like Ibiza, but with a completely different energy. Where Ibiza pulses with beach culture and European sophistication, Santa Fe vibrates with artistic intensity and desert mysticism. The Sangre de Cristo Mountains provide a backdrop that’s simultaneously ancient and modern, spiritual and creative.
That European vibe Root heard in his internal soundtrack? It’s not imitation—it’s convergence. Just as Ibiza drew global artists to its shores, Santa Fe attracts international creativity to the high desert. Both places understand that great art emerges from collision—of cultures, influences, and ideas.
The Ten-Year Journey: Perfecting the Impossible
Here’s where NFX’s story gets truly provocative: Root spent ten years on this project. A decade. In an era when artists pump out singles every few months to feed streaming algorithms, Root spent ten years perfecting Neo Effects.
This wasn’t procrastination—it was precision. Root came from a traditional musicianship background, starting with a Gibson guitar at age eleven, influenced by a classical pianist mother, shaped by artists from Eric Clapton to Joe Bonamassa to Thievery Corporation themselves. All of that human musicianship needed to be channeled through AI music generation technology to create sounds that human hands alone couldn’t produce.
When asked about technology, Root said, ” I embrace everything from beating on a bucket to a Kurzweil synthsizer to a electrified duduk. If it fits I use everything imaginable including AI. To me, music inspires the soul of they who listen.” Just as Wendy Carlos’s 1968 album *Switched-On Bach* introduced the Moog synthesizer to popular consciousness, Root used AI to manifest musical ideas that existed in his mind for thirty years. The technology does not create the vision—it serves the vision.
This is critical to understanding NFX’s achievement. Root wasn’t asking AI, “What should chill music sound like?” He was commanding it: “Here’s what I’ve been hearing for three decades. Help me make it real.” Big difference.
Twenty-Seven Tracks of Beautiful Defiance
In 2025’s attention-deficit streaming economy, releasing a 27-track album spanning 2 hours and 21 minutes is gloriously insane. Conventional wisdom says keep it tight, keep it digestible, respect listeners’ shrinking attention spans. Root said: “Screw that.”
NFX requires this much music because that’s how long it takes to fully articulate Neo Effects. That’s how much sonic territory you need to cover to demonstrate that “aggressive yet mellow” isn’t marketing speak—it’s a legitimate emotional space that previous generations of chill music only hinted at.
Each track builds on the last, creating a narrative arc that respects chill music’s heritage while pushing into uncharted territory. This isn’t a playlist—it’s a manifesto. It’s Root saying, “If you want to understand where chill music can go, you need to commit. Sit down. Pay attention. This is music that works whether you’re actively listening or letting it wash over you, but it deserves your engagement.”
That’s the inheritance from Café Cody’s “soundtrack to your life” philosophy and DJ Maretimo’s meticulously curated continuous mixes. Great chill music isn’t just background—it’s environmental architecture that shapes your experience whether you’re conscious of it or not.
September 2025: Perfect Timing for Neo Effects
NFX dropped in September 2025 into a music industry experiencing unprecedented genre chaos. Electronic music is exploding with experimentation—melodic techno, deep minimal grooves, atmospheric synths, evolving arpeggios. Artists are refusing to stay in designated lanes. The genre-bending revolution that began with artists like Thievery Corporation has become the norm.
But here’s what makes NFX’s timing so delicious: while everyone else is tentatively exploring fusion, Root dropped a fully realized new genre. Not a hybrid. Not a crossover experiment. An entirely new category built on chill music’s foundations but ascending to heights the pioneers couldn’t reach.
The independent artist revolution of 2025 created perfect conditions. With platforms like Spotify and Apple Music emphasizing discovery through sophisticated algorithms, and listeners craving authentic innovation over manufactured trends, NFX can find its audience organically. Every algorithmic recommendation, every playlist addition, every unexpected discovery spreads Neo Effects a little further.
Root’s global distribution across Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, and 150+ streaming platforms isn’t just smart business—it’s strategic infiltration. NFX is everywhere, waiting for listeners to stumble upon it and have their assumptions about chill music completely rewired.
The Lineage Lives: Honoring While Evolving
What makes NFX so satisfying is how it honors chill music’s heritage while fearlessly pushing boundaries. Root clearly studied Café Cody’s evolution from jazz to ambient. He absorbed DJ Maretimo’s seasonal variations and regional flavors. He internalized José Padilla’s sunset philosophy and The Orb’s experimental ambition and Thievery Corporation’s global sophistication.
But NFX doesn’t worship at these altars—it builds new ones. Where Padilla captured Ibiza’s sunset magic, Root captures the paradox of modern life: simultaneously overstimulated and under-engaged, craving both intensity and calm, wanting music that energizes without exhausting.
Neo Effects acknowledges that we’re not the same listeners who lounged at Café del Mar in 1994 or chilled in Heaven’s White Room in 1989. We’ve been shaped by decades of electronic music evolution, global cultural exchange, and technological transformation. We can handle complexity. We appreciate contradiction. We’re ready for chill music that challenges us while relaxing us.
The Sound Nobody Knew They Needed
In the end, that’s NFX’s greatest achievement: creating something nobody requested but everyone needed. The market didn’t demand a new chill genre. Streaming platforms weren’t requesting 27-track albums that defy categorization. Listeners weren’t clamoring for music that’s simultaneously aggressive and mellow.
Root created NFX because it had to exist. Because he’d been carrying it for thirty years. Because the technology finally caught up to the vision. Because chill music deserved an evolution that honored its past while embracing its future.
From Cody Johnson’s Balearic broadcasts to DJ Maretimo’s global empire, from José Padilla’s sunset sessions to Thievery Corporation’s downtempo sophistication, the chill music lineage prepared the ground. NFX is the harvest—three decades in the making, ten years in production, and perfectly timed for a world ready to embrace beautiful contradictions.
The secret soundtrack Bob Root carried for thirty years isn’t secret anymore. Neo Effects has arrived, building on everything that came before while blazing trails into territory chill music has never explored. Café Cody, DJ Maretimo, José Padilla, Thievery Corporation—they’d all recognize NFX as family. But they’d also recognize it as something new, something necessary, something that takes their collective legacy and launches it into orbit.
Chill music isn’t dead. It just evolved beyond our wildest expectations. And it sounds absolutely glorious.
*NFX by ChillTravelers is streaming now on all major platforms. Search for ChillTravelers—no space, just pure Neo Effects bliss.*
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