01 February 2024

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,

12 comments:

  1. In/Flux
    jXcBICZ6QG9nSJ9-7amq7N_dGMAiWorEPPvuujbx0sw
    Endtroducing
    j4-xv3J-2px3fGQumqN5_2eUPR-va89WA6XMwyehcVk
    Stem
    2BSgCXNrBdVFUHVryHDwWnbRAX-FDAd1ClP7cUQX65I

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  2. This is what I'm talking about; my dude breaking off some DJ Shadow that I traded for hardcore records a quarter century ago. Let's be fair...those Septic Death boots were totally worth it.

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  3. Thanks NØ for this trip down memory lane. Your erudition, as always, is captivating. Bristol was an exciting place for a hick like me. Saw Kraftwerk there in 1981. Got my punk gear at Paradise Garage. Dug for records at Revolver. Went 'shopping' in Easton. Danced at St Pauls carnival. Drank cider in the Old E.
    MarkyD

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  4. Hi! thanks for the history lesson on trip hop I'm a big reggae fan but this is my tunes for today and i look forward to where this takes me

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  5. Nathan awesome history lesson I am saving to text. You finally got me just now to buy our 1997 Minneapolis Trip Hop band, Brother Son Sister Moon ($10.65 to my door!) so don't get that one. I remember getting the DJ Shadow then taking a business trip to NYC and thinking the record store I went to on 5th Ave was the actual one on the cover as it looked identical! My little brother and his buds who had a three piece band called 'Nasty Goat' with his bass, Hiroyuki Chiba on the Roland and DOSH on drums who all turned me onto DJ Shadow and Massive Attack stuff. I have a tape or two of his old bands like The Kind who did Dead covers in high school and played our local park once that I will try to post sometime. Thanks for your good work and wisdom brother!

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  6. Well, I'm hella busy with this insanity...trying to post one-a-day for February, so I'm gonna cheat & give a gang-Thanks to Viacomclosedmedown on youtube, anonymous, MarkyD, & Captain J.mo. Appreciate yer kind words & thoughts. Well see what you say by the end of this mess. I'll be trippin' & hoppin'. Trip&hop along.

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  7. Ok, gonna finally give Endtroducing a listen. I've never listened to it, despite Solesides being the first hip hop that i discovered on my own (i.e. not via the radio). I don't have a good excuse. Anyway, i was just giving some trip-hop-adjacent recommendations to a rando on reddit, so this is perfect. Looking forward to this month, thanks NØ!

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    Replies
    1. Good to hear from you once again, my friend. Hope you like Endtro. Give Stem a try if you have the time. I really like it (& its short). Hope the rest of the month provides somethings you'll like. Take care & happy new year.

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  8. I've never heard this, other than a track now and then so it's time to give the whole thing a listen. Many thanks!

    Brian

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  9. He did the mixes for Jurassic 5 side guests project Quannum MC's.
    Check out Concentration for On Fire Productions and there is instrumental version of the album.

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  10. Thanks for the comment. If you're talking the Deep Concentration series, experimental hip-hop is not too far removed from some Trip-hop. I think there are at least four volumes in the DC series, most featuring folks from the Quannum Projects roster.

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