Fab, You Weary? 1

As Daddy G sez about Trip-hop: "Dance music for the head, rather than the feet."

I've never shied away from the fact that I'm a Trip-hopper.

Viacomclosedmedown on youtube sez:
     "Nathan Nothin' - former show promoter, Bill Nelson fanatic as all we are, who once saw the MC5, with the best Trip Hop related & revB old school music well of info."

Got me thinking about my relationship with Trip-hop. I have always partaken of live music. I love to shake my tailfeathers. I cut a plenty good rug for a white guy. I do have rhythm. Since the early days of hip-hop I was enraptured by the beats & sampling / programming elements. I was just never enpaptured by the "rap" parts. So when I first encountered Trip-hop in the mid-90s, I knew they were on to something big, something important. I started buying everything I could find & ended up with quite a shitload.

That & a spate of recent requests for "more Tip-hop, please" made me decide to dedicate February to the Music that Could have Saved the World.

Sinuous & mysterious as a plume of drifting smoke, a new sort of groove wafted three decades ago from Bristol, a bohemian university town in the west of England. Though its prime movers, Massive Attack, Tricky, Portishead, Smith & Mighty, all loathe the term coined in June 1994 by Andy Pemberton in a feature for Mixmag, the word "Trip-hop" has become synonymous with the style created by those Bristol artists. The sensuous grooves fulfilled a timeless human need for a bass-heavy sound to touch the secret recesses of our imagination & lure our dreamworld onto the dance floor. Trip-hop was tailor-made for the moment when a rebel wants to get tender. 

 

 

The fundamental trip-hop tempo is slow, slow but relentless, presided over by immense bass figures, as deep but less booming than those of house music. There are lots of rhythm drop-outs, as in Dub, lots of inserted snippets of instruments or noises proliferate wildly in the cleverest mixes. The tone of many Trip-hop numbers is sleepy, jaded, but the lyrics, primarily sung in a smolder by women being loved softly, usually spring from the raw wounds of social or romantic anguish.

 

Bristol thrived as a slave port for hundreds of years: in the modern era it's one of Britain's blackest cities, culturally & socially. It's long been home to a West Indian community. Shebeens & Sound Systems were a way of life for all music-loving Bristolian youth. Being a port, Bristol was always awash in cannabis & hashish. There is no lack of locally-grown life-enhancers like scrumpy cider & hallucinogenic mushrooms. Great fuel for Bristol's music scene.

 

 

Over the years since its birth, Trip-hop has been re-imagined as chill-out, downtempo, illbient, & lounge music. The initial movement grew, exploded, & waned. In the early 2000s a 2nd wave of Trip-hop emerged, grew, exploded, & waned. The second wave tried to recreate the original sound as closely as the times allowed. By the late 00s & early 10s the process repeated itself once again. This time the sound was augmented by 21st Century studio technology. During the month I will try to touch on all the various phases of Trip-hop, though I am partial to the original sound, but I have shared it extensively here in the past, so the second wave of Trip-hop will undoubtedly be the most shared.

 

 

Many varied artists have dabbled in Trip-hop: Lana Del Rey's Born to Die; FKA Twigs' EP2; Madonna's Justify My Love; Gorillaz; Björk: Nine Inch Nails; Beth Orton; The Flaming Lips; The Deftones; all have succumbed to the sense of opiated mystery that is Trip-hop.  Even jazz greats like Jon Hassell has made forays into Trip-hop (Jon Hassell & Bluescreen - Dressing for Pleasure 1994 will pop up sometime this month).

But what of the true birth of Trip-hop. Let's go back to June 1994 & Andy Pemberton's coinng of the much-loathed genre label. He sez it in reference to the single "In/Flux b/w Hindsight" that came out on the soon to be Trip-hop influential label Mo' Wax out of London,UK run by James Lavelle of UNKLE. 

 

"In/Flux" was the brain-child of one Joshua Paul Davis aka DJ Shadow along with the Groove Robbers. Perhaps my love of Trip-hop somewhat stems from the fact that I knew J. when I was living in San Jose & doing EAT POOP! 'zine. Josh was born in San Jose & went to college at UCDavis where he DJed for the campus radio station KDVS. He created his own DJ-ready music merging elements of hip-hop with funk, rock, jazz, ambient, soul, & many other styles he found in the used-bin records of the many Bay-area record shops we both heavily frequented. His music was in the same vein as the experimental hip-hop style associated with the London-based Mo' Wax record label. 

 

Mo' Wax's James Lavelle became aware of Shadow through his first Soulsides release, the Entropy 12". Lavelle contacted Shadow in 1993 about releasing "In/Flux" on the fledgling imprint. So although Trip-hop is thought of as an originally British genre, DJ Shadow's work with Mo' Wax ("In/Flux","Lost & Found", & much much more) & with DJ Krush led to many stellar breakthroughs in the genre (Shadow added his genius to the Lavelle / Tim Goldsworthy mix of the Massive Attack song "Karmacoma").

Here is the "In/Flux" single...

 

DJ Shadow & the Groove Robbers - In/Flux bw Hindsight 12" single, Mo Wax MW 014, 1993.
all decryption codes in comments

Upside -
In/Flux
Down Beat -
Hindsight

 

 

 

 

But the release of DJ Shadow's debut album Endtroducing in 1996 was a monumental moment in music. Endtroducing is the first album created entirely from samples. DJ Shadow made the whole thing using only an AKAI MPC60 12-bit sampling drum machine, dual turntables, & an early version of Pro Tools borrowed from Dan "The Automator" Nakamura. The gatefold cover is at Rare Records in Sacramento with Tom Shimura - Asia (later Lyrics) Born in wig; Xavier Mosley - Chief Xcel with vinyl stack; & Beni B in basebal cap along with Rare Records cat.

 

DJ Shadow - Entroducing....., Mo Wax MW059CD, 1996.

Best Foot Forward
Building Steam with a Grain of Salt
The Number Song   
Changeling
**Transmission 1   
What Does Your Soul Look Like (Part 4)
Untitled   
Stem/Long Stem   
**Transmission 2   
Mutual Slump   
Organ Donor   
Why Hip Hop Sucks in '96   
Midnight in a Perfect World   
Napalm Brain/Scatter Brain
What Does Your Soul Look Like (Part 1 - Blue Sky Revisit)
**Transmission 3

 

 

 

 

One more, possibly one of my favorite tastes of Trip-hop from the man who, in his own words, "accidentally invented trip-hop", 1997s CD single Stem.

 

DJ Shadow - Stem, Mo Wax MW058CD, 1996.

i        Stem
ii        Long Stem   
iii        Red Bus Needs To Leave!   
iv        Soup (exclusive release)
bonus track -   Stem (Cops & Robbers mix from the movie Heat)

 

 

Enjoy the Trip,
NØ