As DJ Food’s Strictly Kev put it recently, at its best the music was “psychedelic beat collages, usually instrumental, embracing samples, analogue electronics and dub FX.” The list is contained to the 1990s for historical accuracy and tries to steer away from the music’s strongholds to show the width and breadth of the sound. There is no purism to indulge in, because there is nothing pure about trip-hop. In putting together this list, we tried to take all of this into account. And tastemakers like Gilles Peterson have championed the music’s evolution across decades. Flying Lotus has cited DJ Krush as an influence. When I spoke to Daddy Kev in 2012, he pointed to Mo’ Wax as one of the key influences for Low End Theory. To those who believed in it though, it always held a promise of things weird and wonderful.Īlongside IDM (another etymological faux pas from the 1990s), trip-hop presaged the beat scene of the late 2000s, a continuation of the ideas and aesthetic it first articulated. It was music for people who felt rap was too dangerous. By the late 1990s, trip-hop had become nothing more than limp, often stoner-friendly, coffee table hip-hop beats. Mo’ Wax, often seen as responsible for the sound, originally kicked off riding the acid-jazz wave, a sound that soon exhausted itself into a creative cul-de-sac. No matter the names or the execution, the DNA was the same. In New York City, a loosely linked group of artists, thinkers and musicians spread from downtown Manhattan to Brooklyn’s cheap warehouses to imagine their own version of the sound, which The Wire magazine dubbed illbient. In Austria, Kruder & Dorfmeister added an extra layer of dub and turned trip-hop into downbeat in a haze of weed paranoia. In Paris, DJ Cam pushed out his own blunted beats to eager continental heads. Both labels crafted a unique visual dimension and assembled expansive rosters. In London, Ninja Tune played yin to Mo’ Wax’s yang. On the ground, the sound did resonate in a genuine way among a new generation of musicians seeking freedom to experiment. In 1998, The New York Times retconned Massive Attack’s debut album Blue Lines as the so-called genre’s inception point. Most notably, it became a byword for the Bristol sound epitomised by bands like Massive Attack and Portishead. Just as techno had become a synonym for dance music, trip-hop soon became a crutch for journalists and marketers wanting to signify hip-hop without rappers. Trip-hop was a logical evolution in a decade during which everyone came down from a partying high to face the reality that hip-hop and dance music were being co-opted by the mainstream dreams of a new sonic utopia crushed by the relentless onslaught of capitalism. Sound systems, digging, dub, chill-out rooms, early globalisation and technology also acted like so many molecules attaching themselves to a new idea of what hip-hop could be.
One strand came from hip-hop, which had fed the musical imagination of a new generation for over a decade, while another strand came from rave, which had provided further stylistic possibilities with its fusion of drum machines, breaks, samples and synthesisers. The DNA of trip-hop was more complex than its reduction to bite-sized adjectives. Pemberton heralded trip-hop as a psychedelic take on hip-hop and the first valid alternative to America’s dominance of the music. I say this as someone who, for the past 18 odd years, has loved the music just as much as I’ve hated the term.Ĭoined in June 1994 by Andy Pemberton in a feature for Mixmag, trip-hop was used to describe the recent stylistic shift of the Mo’ Wax label and that music’s popularity in dance circles, particularly in after hours sessions.
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