Trip-Hop is for those who like their headphone music to have some groove -- long on mood and melody but short on the histrionics of rap, trip-hop is the smoother, lazier sister of the hip-hop genre. All the techniques of sampling,... [more]

Trip-Hop is for those who like their headphone music to have some groove -- long on mood and melody but short on the histrionics of rap, trip-hop is the smoother, lazier sister of the hip-hop genre. All the techniques of sampling, scratching, and looping are present, but the hard-edged frontman has been thrown over in favor of bare instrumentals. When a human voice is present, it's most likely to be the sweeping sigh of a female singer. Originally a UK phenomenon, this softened offshoot of hip-hop can perhaps be explained by what Simon Reynolds delicately terms "the difficulties involved in rapping convincingly in an English accent." The resulting music, typified by Massive Attack, Tricky, and Portishead, is a heavily stoned cousin to the already heavily stoned Dub phenomenon, which features ridiculously huge reverb effects on isolated snare drums while snatches of song drop down wells of echo. Filmic and atmospheric, the gentle melancholy of synthetic orchestras mixed over slow tempos (practically comatose by hardcore techno standards) has more to do with bathtubs and bedrooms than dance floors. It also implies more than a passing interest in various selections from the rock pharmacopoeia. Bristol was the breeding ground for the early trip-hoppers, including producer Nellee Hooper, whose 1990 track for Sinead O'Connor's "I Am Stretched On Your Grave" may be seen as an early move towards the new sound (even if the James Brown drum sample is a few BPMs too quick). Perhaps the true dawn of trip-hop can be traced to the release of Massive Attack's seminal "Blue Lines" in 1991. Integrating a laconic, ganga-infused take on hip-hop, jazz, funk, and rock, the album was the first to bring world attention to the genre. Yet it was in America that the dreamy cut-up style of trip-hop was taken to the next level, with California's DJ Shadow. A hip-hop afficionado who deems no sample unusable, Shadow perfected the bleary beat collage style with 1993's "In/Flux." His sound freaked out British DJs with its "deft fusion of head-nodding beats, supa-phat bass, and an obsessive attention to the kind of other-wordly sounds usually found on acid house records" - at least according to a 1994 issue of Mixmag. [show less]