The rave scene pioneered the concept of the chill-out lounge, but as it has infiltrated wider dance culture, so it has become all things to all clubbers. Slow to break out of the 'ambient new age' ghetto, until now the best chill out music has been the smokin' vibe of dub. Too fashionable for its own good, the chill-out genre has all too often been a dumping ground for the shallow vibes of acid jazz wannabees.

As if to appropriate the genre, Camberwell's Chill Out Records have rolled a joint more smokin' than the borough's eponymous carrot. Their catalogue already encompasses the ground-breaking fusion of Chill Out Classics Vol 1, which melds dub rhythms and classical compositions in the tradition of the Union Chapel's Big Chill club, and the massive Chill Out Highland Gala, which lit up the Western Isles better than the Northern Lights. And after their appearance on Radio 3's avant garde music programme Mixing It, Chill Out artists Slowly are collaborating on a compilation album for the show.

Slowly fuse original jazz melodies and rhythms with the heavy vibes of dub better than any of their rivals. Imagine if you will, classic Miles Davis trumpet (from the In a Silent Way era) playing over dub basslines and jazz rhythms, and you have the rough idea. Sounds an easy trick, but Slowly have merged these influences so effortlessly that the music sounds as 'though it has always existed, instead of emerging from the imagination of two brothers and a collection of the best hip hop, jazz, dub and club musicians to grace South London.

Ming is the album title, and the music certainly reflects the sense of exquisite workmanship, venerable age and robust fragility one associates with this ancient porcelain. Collaborators on the album include Pascal's Bongo Massive of 'Getting Started', Hip Hop DJ D-Zine of D*Note (on the decks), the flute and sax of Dan Lipman (who played on Björk's album) with Fender Rhodes piano by Scott Addison of Corduroy.

With such a large list of contributors, the mechanics of playing live mean a large amount of the collaborator's licks are thrown into the Akai S1000 and triggered from Slowly's venerable Atari on stage! Sometime Hip Hop producer and half of the production duo that is Slowly, Caspar Kedros explained Slowly's working methods.

"Basically what we do is, wherever we can get to record stuff we get a line from the desk and put them down on DAT then throw the pieces into the sampler and build the track from there. Some of the brass and trumpets is live on tape, and other parts it's sampled off. Working on a budget, as we always are, is not so much of a restriction, it means that you have to find ways around stuff, which is really creative. You've got like half an hour with a flute player, so you get him to play enough stuff so there's something there you can use. It's kind of like remixing where you've got a choice of what you can use and edit into the track."

Live playing is an integral part of the Slowly vibe. This stems from the brothers' background, in live performance and engineering. Brother Darius plays bass while Caspar himself plays guitar. His cool, jazzy licks are an essential element of the Slowly vibe. The guitar is also an important writing tool, alongside Cubase and all the sampled loops.

"A lot of it is written on guitar, the chord progressions are generally worked out on guitar and then transcribed onto the other instruments. Darius is the bass player, so all the grooves are coming from him. We play the guitars and bass into the DAT, sample off the best bits, build up a groove, then play keyboard parts in from there when we go into the studio.

"The sequencer is a great arranging tool. Working from home as we do, we have to build up an almost finished track before we book time in a studio and add the top stuff, Oberheim, trumpets, whatever. We use Moogs a lot of the time, adding that in live. There's a little bit of JD800 and TB303 on there as well, which we all have a go at programming. We're quite into using classic synths, Rhodes, Hammonds etc. The 303 is a bit more recent than those, but it still fits in the same category of classic synths. It's got its own completely characteristic sound."

Jazz is a big element of Slowly's dub plates, with classic muted trumpet solos and breezy guitars weaving their way in and around grinding dubby basslines, funky drum loops and general dubwise keyboard mayhem. Caspar was happy to list some of his personal greats and expound upon the vibe that is Slowly jazz.

"I like jazz like Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, Jaco Pastorious, Weather Report, people that that are always being progressive. Stuff like Count Basie and jazz like that is great too, but it's too set in its ways. We're not the future of jazz or anything, this is just another angle on it really, another extreme.

"A lot of the current fashionable jazz scene are just recreating the sound of records from ten, twenty, thirty years ago. For us there's no point to that because you're not progressing, all you're doing is being a scientist, researching how they did it.

"Jazz is all about learning from the past but doing something fresh with it, doing something of your own."