Trip-Hop

Bristol's slow sampled music, where hip-hop drums, dub bass and film-score shadows share one room

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Trip-hop is Bristol's slow sampled music from the 1990s, where hip-hop drums, dub bass and film-score shadows share one studio.

Origins and era

In the 1980s Bristol's Wild Bunch sound system played soul, reggae and hip-hop, mixing low-end musics across a night, and the reggae sound-system tradition of St Paul's let a second generation re-cut their parents' records on samplers. Massive Attack's Blue Lines in 1991 turned slow drums, sampled voices and dub bass into a complete album; Portishead's Dummy in 1994 and Tricky's Maxinquaye in 1995 pushed gloom, vinyl crackle and female voices forward. Trip hop was a term coined by the British press in 1994, and most of the musicians rejected it. In the United States DJ Shadow took another route in 1996 with Endtroducing....., built entirely from samples.

What you hear

Tempos mostly run from 80 to 100 BPM. Drums come from hip-hop and funk breaks, usually with vinyl noise and scratching. Bass is thick and slow, chords lean minor and diminished, and samples come from film dialogue, sustained jazz and old records, with Isaac Hayes and film-score strings common sources. Voices are often low female lines or rapped passages, drenched in reverb as if in an empty room. Song form stays intact, verses and choruses clearly marked, only slowed and widened.

Key figures

Massive Attack's 3D, Daddy G and Mushroom made collective production a method, Portishead's Geoff Barrow and Beth Gibbons bound samples to a voice, Tricky mixed rapping with hoarse whispering, and DJ Shadow and UNKLE carried the approach into instrumental and visual work. Bristol's Smith & Mighty had joined reggae and hip-hop earlier still.

Lineage

Hip-hop, dub reggae, soul and film music feed in; downtempo, the mood of lo-fi hip-hop, and advertising and trailer scores come out. It turned sampling from a rhythmic tool into an atmospheric one.

Common misunderstandings

Trip-hop is not a genre of sad songs; it is first a set of sampling and drum practices. Nor is it uniquely Bristol's, since London and New York produced similar work. The musicians disliked the label because it packed very different producers under one word and made them sound like a single style.

Sources

• David Toop, Ocean of Sound（Serpent's Tail, 1995），用于核对布里斯托场景与采样美学
• The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., entry Trip hop，用于交叉核对年代与代表艺人

Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.