’90s Trip Hop

Tricky’s debut long player takes some elements of his former band Massive Attacks’ approach — hip hop-derived rhythms, slow tempos, close-up, intimate, low-key rapping, and that anxious, noir atmosphere — and twists and stretches them to his own, bleak, unique purpose, resulting in a claustrophobic, tense hip hop / trip hop / goth hop album. Each song features vocals from Martina Topley-Bird and it’s her voice that really makes this album — certainly without her humanity, melody and hooks to balance out the intense sonic soup of murky atmospherics, grimy beats and Tricky’s bristling, subdued raps, it would be a much plainer and darker listen. Separated from its initial shock impact by nearly three decades, Maxinquaye remains a stark and striking original.

The first album from French producer, DJ and electronic musician Jean Yves Prieur is a charming collection of dense, fuzzy, trip hop and electronic sample-based tracks that occasionally tip over into gentle folkish, lounge and easy listening territory in a most agreeable fashion. Prieur’s take on the trip hop template included the requisite sluggish tempos, crusty drum breaks and sleepy, slightly narcotic mood, but he dispensed with its smoked-out paranoia, revelling instead in a cheery, sunny disposition. The ghosts of pop, lounge and acoustic folk are contained here, and although it’s sometimes difficult to discern the original flavour of the overlapping sampled parts he’s assembled, there’s a soft and familiar easy-listening musicality to the whole album. Not all trip hop is calming or soporific because it’s stoner music, some of it, like A Grand Love Story, is calming and soporific because of its lullaby qualities: there’s a warm heart at the centre of this album.

The third album from Paris’ DJ Cam is an elegant, minimal trip hop affair, deftly blending raw drum breaks, vinyl scratching and abstract textures with live jazz playing and jazz samples. Abstract Manifesto also includes a few drum & bass experimentations that explore the half-speed/double speed possibilities of mixing super fast and super slow genres (jungle/drum & bass and trip hop respectively). There’s a purist sensibility to the tracks: the beats feel like authentic MPC or SP1200 boom baps, the jazz playing on tracks like opener Maiden Voyage, the swinging Un été à Paris and the silky smooth Yes Yes No is a real, breathing part of the productions, and there’s no musical fat, every track is lean, efficient and classy.

1996’s Songs of a Dead Dreamer was the debut from turntablist and ‘illbient’ artist DJ Spooky and is an album from the darkest reaches of the trip hop universe. Taking the edgy, anxious and paranoid feel that defined much early trip hop further than it had ever been, he constructed an uneasy, haunted and frankly dark soundtrack for a non-existent horror film. Fragmentary snippets and transitory slivers of sampled audio fade in and out of the mix and drones and unearthly sound effects fill the sound field while distorted loops creep in and out of focus. Songs Of A Dead Dreamer is a child of hip hop but the family resemblance is hard to see, as though the album was taken from its parents as a baby and chained up in a cellar.

Released in 1995, DJ Food (Kevin Foakes aka Strictly Kev) had already released a series of DJ tool/beats/sound effects records on UK label Ninja Tune and A Recipe For Disaster was his first ‘proper’ album. Reflecting the contemporaneous growth of cross-genre and eclectic club nights and DJing, Recipe… is an album of day-glo, sample-heavy beat-science cross-pollinations. There’s plenty of abstract instrumental hip hop, expert turntablism and sample-aided reconstituted funk, Foakes filling in the gaps where rappers would have rapped with layers of recognisable instrumental samples and all sorts of synth and studio trickery too. He also includes some Latin and drum & bass-influenced tracks and, in an album with a generally party-friendly mood, a couple of quieter introspective moments too. Fun, super-funky and with never a dull moment.

Japanese hip hop evangelist and turntablism specialist DJ Krush dropped Meiso, his fourth studio album, in 1995. It’s a mix of vocal hip hop tracks — C.L. Smooth, Malik B, Deflon Sallahr and Big Shug all make guest appearances — and instrumentals. The feel is reflective and inward-looking, the sound palette is pure, distilled underground hip hop. The sampled and reprogrammed drum beats pop out of the mix, having clearly been the subject of much attention in the studio, the cut and thrust of the kick-snare combo fetishised and moved to centre stage. Simple, foreboding bass tones sit under the beats while slices of sampled audio and vinyl scratches drop in and out on top, always tastefully placed, everything arranged in neat order. Stand-out track is the collaboration with DJ Shadow Duality, a nearly 9-minute epic of brooding beatology, turntablism, studio beat juggling and abstract audio. Cool, clean, minimal underground hip hop.

Released at the tail end of summer 94, Portishead’s debut was highly accomplished, highly acclaimed — it would go on to win the Mercury Music Prize the following year — and highly strung, perhaps one of electronic music’s most angst-ridden albums. Mixing up hip hop beats (homemade in the studio rather than sampled), dub, 60s spy movie and film noir influences, it was a haunting, melancholy listen, lifted to wonderfully lonely heights by the mournful chanteuse vocals of Beth Gibbons. Dummy delighted in dirge tempos, haunting, tremelo’d guitars redolent of countless spaghetti soundtracks. and a dark, desolate gothic aesthetic. The soundtrackesque feel of many of the tracks, together with Gibbons’ alternating touching frailty and torrential passion make for one of the 90s most affecting and emotional electronic albums.

Austrian DJ/producers Kruder and Dorfmeister released their DJ Kicks compilation in summer 1996, and it remains a highlight of the long-running DJ mix series. As with any DJ mix compilation, the music is obviously the most important, and K&D picked the absolute cream of mid-90s dub, trip hop and electronica, a highly complementary series of languid, unhurried and introspective electronic releases. What was particularly ear-catching at the time was that they also mixed in smooth, laid-back drum & bass tracks at twice the tempo of the dub and trip hop tunes, producing a mix that really flowed and moved, a dubbed-out progressive journey through the various flavours of mid-decade downtempo electronic music. One of the best commercially released DJ mixes of the period.

Bristol’s innovative and influential Massive Attack opened their second album with the title track, a luminous eight-minute street soul lament graced by a wistful vocal from Every Thing But The Girl’s Tracy Thorn floating above a soft bed of warm synth pads, all held down by a sample from, paradoxically, one of James Brown’s toughest beats. And that tension between the soft and the hard repeats throughout the album, as the band pair a familiar warmth with a sense of bittersweet yearning, matching abstract, gaseous synth/sample backing tracks with big vocal statements from Horace Andy and Thorn, and blending soothing strings with deep bass. Low tempo but high temperature, detached but cautiously open, Protection is nocturnal music, lit by streetlights and strobes rather than sunlight.

The start of a brand new, introspective, circumspect and softer approach in UK dance music, Blue Lines’ sample-heavy weaving together of dub, hip hop and soul defined a new post-club aesthetic. Considered the trip hop originator, it actually contains way more vocals — rapped and sung — than most of the genre it spawned. Featuring a distinctly British take on hip hop with rhythm tracks created from pieces of soul, funk and reggae history, repurposed into gentle but powerful musical collages, and decorated with a light dusting of bittersweet synths. In an album full of beautiful moments, Shara Nelson’s career-defining anthem Unfinished Sympathy shines like the brightest star in the clearest of night skies. Loved by a generation of clubbers, its influence spread out across 90s dance and pop music and on into the next century: a genuine classic.

The debut album from Attica Blues came out on trip hop label Mo Wax in 1997 and is a quietly unassuming, high-class UK hip hop-soul-down-tempo-beatology-hybrid. Their presence on Mo Wax and their sliced and diced break beats qualify this album as trip hop, but Attica Blues clearly had higher aims than simply chopping up some old funk drums and adding abstract soundscaping on top. This is an album of stark and stately soul, jazz, instrumental hip hop and turntablism, a set of tracks with a seriousness to them. Attica Blues was a transitional release, something of a musical bridge between hip hop, trip hop, soul and the emerging club sound of broken beat and remains a confident, bold, uncompromising and undervalued album in UK Black British music history.

Smokers Delight is a largely instrumental collection of funky, multi-layered sample collages, pulling together most of the strands of influence that led to the late 80s / early 90s dance music explosion: reggae, dub, soul, jazz, funk, hip hop, boogie, disco and electro. The tempo, hip hop beats, and sample-based style all qualify Smokers Delight as trip hop album, but the gloom and angst present in much trip hop is largely absent here. NoW instead choose a much sunnier, laid-back take on the trip hop vibe, one more redolent of an Ibizan sunset than the bleaker landscapes oft conjured by the likes of Portishead or Tricky. Congas and bongos double up with dusty breakbeats, while the sampler provides snatches of keys, horns, guitars, and pianos from long-forgotten 45s, repurposed into new configurations. A relaxed, unhurried montage of the musical building blocks of dance music that feels warm and welcoming.

UK dub producer and engineer Mad Professors’ dub version of Massive Attack’s second album was an extremely successful reworking that transformed the original into a deep, powerful, grinding dub / electronic adventure. Mad Professor took the soulful, melancholy and introspective tracks of the original apart and abstracted them, emphasising some elements, subduing others, rebuilding them using his studio as an instrument. He lays the dub reggae effects on thick, rebounding echos and delays flow around the headphones, sounds are placed in huge reverberating spaces and there’s depth and distance in the gaps between the synthetic and sampled audio. Mad Professor continually locates either the precise location of the groove or the true shape of the emotion in each song and then brings his chosen elements to the fore. A dub album superbly done.

From 1995, this compilation drew together some of the best previously released instrumental hip hop from Manchester’s Grand Central/Fat City record labels. The tunes on here fall under the trip hop banner but didn’t exhibit much of the ‘trippy’, noir, or soundtrackesque trip hop tropes; this was the party-friendly, funky end of the trip hop continuum, with some of the chunkiest, most sound-system-friendly beats of the mid-90s. Highlights included First Priority’s Jazz Hypnosis and Pure Arithmetic, a pair of, respectively, hard-hitting, moody and jubilant, funky cuts taken from their debut 12” release. The slower, more introspective tunes are drowsy, soulful and slinky, a couple of selections in particular from Funky Fresh Few beautifully realised soulful sample cut-ups, and three high energy forays into the smoother end of drum & bass are also included. Top-notch head-nodding sample funk and dexterous instru-hip hop.

A pioneering and influential album built entirely from vinyl samples, most of them lifted by DJ Shadow from records in the basement of now-defunct Rare Records store in Sacramento. Endtroducing is perhaps the most hip hop of all trip hop albums, the beats bonafide, the scratching true to the craft, his Akai MPC sampler mimicking hip hop DJ beat juggling. It’s an album built from parts of lost b-sides, last-ditch efforts, records that failed and that no one ever heard, reconstructed into new forms, each sample a snippet of someone’s long-forgotten hopes. In the 2001 hip hop documentary Scratch, DJ Shadow refers to the piles of old, obscure vinyl where he painstakingly hunted for the raw materials for his debut album as “like a big pile of broken dreams” and there’s a genuine sense of yearning contained in his reassembled beats and chords, which is all the more impressive when you remember how they are created. Easily one of the finest trip hop albums.