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Trip hop (or trip-hop) is a genre consisting of downtempo electronic music, originating in the early 1990s in the United Kingdom, especially Bristol. Deriving from "post"-acid house,^[1] the term was first used by the British music media and press as a way to describe the more experimental variant of breakbeat which contained influences of soul, funk and jazz.^[1] According to Merriam-Webster's Dictionary, the term was first used in 1989.^[2] Encyclopædia Britannica Online also claims that the term was coined by Mixmag, a British magazine specialising in dance music.^[3] It has been described as "Europe's alternative choice in the second half of the '90s", and "a fusion of hip hop and electronica until neither genre is recognisable."^[4] Trip hop music fuses several styles and has much in common with other genres; it has several qualities similar to ambient music,^[1] its drum-based breakdowns share characteristics with hip hop from the United States,^[1] and it also contains elements of house, dance and dub reggae. Trip hop can be highly experimental in nature.^[1]

Musically, trip hop contains a slow tempo and a hypnotic sound created by an electronic background and prominent string instrumentation. It is usually characterised by beat-driven music which, despite being instrumentally similar to hip hop, varies much in style. Trip hop is characterised by a generally deep, atmospheric sound, and its influences vary, ranging from R&B and urban, to rock and jazz-styled recordings. Nonetheless, the genre is often characterised by low-key productions. Vocals are at times absent or sparse,^[1] even though this is not the case for all trip hop.

Ever since its rise to prominence in the mid to late-1990s, trip hop has enjoyed commercial success not only in its native United Kingdom, but across the world as well. The genre has been described as one which was able to appeal to a mainstream audience.^[1] Several trip hop artists and bands, such as Lamb, Massive Attack, Tricky, Mr Scruff, Portishead and Morcheeba have received attention and/or chart success, both on mainstream national charts and on the more dance and indie-based ones.^[1] Various prominent artists and groups, such as Janet Jackson,^[5] Kylie Minogue,^[6] Madonna,^[7][8] Björk,^[9][10][11] and Radiohead,^[12] have incorporated trip hop in their work. Trip hop has spawned several subgenres which have evolved over the ages, including trip rock (a fusion between trip hop and rock music) as well as Illbient (dub-based trip hop with influences of ambient and industrial hip hop), all part of a post-trip hop scene which encompasses a wider range of styles and influences.

History[link]

1980s: Soundsystem origins[link]

Trip hop may have originated in the mid-1980s in Bristol, UK,^[13] during a time when American hip hop started to gain increasing popularity there along with the then exploding popularity of the house music and dance scene. Although, the term, 'trip hop' was coined first by Andy Pemberton, a music journalist writing for Mixmag, in June 1994 to describe Mo Wax Records Artist (U.K) R.P.M and (American) DJ Shadow's "In/Flux" single.^[14] The originators of hip hop music in the 1970s had been Jamaican-born New Yorkers, but new US regional forms of MCing and DJing arose, and the genre's rise to mainstream success quickly severed it from direct Caribbean antecedents. The UK hip hop scene tended to sample more deeply from Jamaican influences, due to the larger Caribbean ancestry of the British black population, and the existing mass British popularity of reggae, dancehall and dub in the 1980s. Under the influence of American hip hop from the 1980s, both black and white British youth became consumers of hip hop.^{[citation needed]} Hip hop in the UK, unlike the US, was immediately fused with soul, R&B and elements of dancehall.^{[citation needed]}

In Bristol, once one of the most important ports in the Atlantic slave trade and now among Britain's most racially diverse cities, hip hop began to seep into the consciousness of a subculture already well-schooled in Jamaican forms of music. DJs, MCs, b-boys and graffiti artists grouped together into informal soundsystems. Like the pioneering Bronx crews of DJs Kool Herc, Afrika Bambataa and Grandmaster Flash, the soundsystems provided party music for public spaces, often in the economically deprived council estates from which some of their members originated. Bristol's soundsystem DJs, drawing heavily on Jamaican dub music, typically used a laid-back, slow and heavy drum beat ("down tempo").

Bristol's Wild Bunch crew was one of the soundsystems to put a local spin on the international phenomenon, helping to birth Bristol's signature sound of trip hop. The Wild Bunch and its associates included at various times in its existence the MC Adrian "Tricky Kid" Thaws, the graffiti artist and lyricist Robert "3D" Del Naja, and the DJs Nellee Hooper, Andrew "Mushroom" Vowles and Grant "Daddy G" Marshall. As the hip hop scene matured in Bristol and musical trends evolved further toward acid jazz and house in the late '80s, the golden era of the soundsystem was ending. The Wild Bunch signed a record deal and evolved into Massive Attack, a core collective of 3D, Mushroom and Daddy G, with significant contributions from Tricky Kid (soon shortened to Tricky) and Hooper on production duties, along with a rotating cast of other vocalists.

Another influence was Gary Clail's Tackhead soundsystem. Clail often worked with former The Pop Group singer Mark Stewart. The latter experimented with his band Mark Stewart & The Maffia which consisted of New York session musicians Skip McDonald, Doug Wimbish, and Keith LeBlanc, who had been a part of the house band for the Sugarhill Records record label.^[15] Produced by Adrian Sherwood, the music combined hiphop with experimental rock and dub and sounded like a premature version of what later became triphop.

Early to mid 1990s: Trip-hop's mainstream breakthrough[link]

	"Teardrop" noicon Sample of "Teardrop" by Massive Attack, from Mezzanine – main theme, in the US, for the Fox Network's TV show "House, MD".
Problems listening to this file? See media help.

Massive Attack, a British trip hop group which helped bring the genre to mainstream success in the 1990s.^[16]

Massive Attack's first album Blue Lines was released in 1991 to huge success in the UK. Blue Lines was seen widely as the first major manifestation of a uniquely British hip hop movement, but the album's hit single "Unfinished Sympathy" and several other tracks, while their rhythms were largely sample-based, were not seen as hip hop songs in any conventional sense. Shara Nelson, an R&B singer, featured on the orchestral "Unfinished," and Jamaican dance hall star Horace Andy provided vocals on several other tracks, as he would throughout Massive Attack's career. Massive Attack released their second album entitled Protection in 1994. Although Tricky stayed on in a lesser role, and Hooper again produced, the fertile dance music scene of the early '90s had informed the record, and it was seen as an even more significant shift away from the Wild Bunch era.

Tricky, a major trip hop artist.

The term trip hop was coined that year, but not in reference to anything on the Massive Attack albums. In the June 1994 issue of UK magazine Mixmag, music journalist Andy Pemberton used it to describe the hip hop instrumental "In/Flux", a 1993 single by San Francisco's DJ Shadow, and other similar tracks released on the Mo' Wax label and being played in London clubs at the time. "In/Flux", with its mixed up bpms, spoken word samples, strings, melodies, bizarre noises, prominent bass, and slow beats, gave the listener the impression they were on a musical trip, according to Pemberton.^[17] Soon, however, Massive Attack's dubby, jazzy, psychedelic, electronic textures, rooted in hip hop sampling technique but taking flight into many styles, were described by journalists as the template of the eponymous genre.

1994 and 1995 saw trip hop near the peak of its popularity, with artists such as Howie B and Naked Funk making significant contributions. Those years also marked the rise of London band Red Snapper.^{[citation needed]} More significantly, the period marked the debut of two acts who, along with Massive Attack, would define the Bristol scene for years to come.

In 1994 Portishead released their debut album, Dummy. A trio fronted by singer Beth Gibbons, Portishead also included sonic manipulators Geoff Barrow and Adrian Utley. Their background differed from Massive Attack in many ways: one of Portishead's primary influences was 1960s and '70s film soundtrack LPs. Nevertheless, Portishead shared the scratchy, jazz-sample-based aesthetic of early Massive Attack (who Barrow had briefly worked with during the recording of Blue Lines), and the sullen, fragile vocals of Gibbons also brought them wide acclaim. In 1995, Dummy was awarded the Mercury Music Prize as the best British album of the year, giving trip-hop as a genre its greatest exposure yet. Portishead's music, seen as cutting edge in its film noir feel and stylish, yet emotional appropriations of past sounds, was also widely imitated, causing the band to recoil from the trip-hop label they had inadvertently helped popularize.

Tricky also released his debut solo album, Maxinquaye, in 1995, to great critical acclaim. With Massive Attack, Tricky had been known for his unique, whispered, often abstract stream-of-consciousness murmuring, influential on 3D's own rapping attempts, and already seen as remote from the gangsta rap braggadocio of the mid '90s US hip hop scene. Even more unusually, however, many of the solo songs on Maxinquaye did not even feature Tricky's own voice. His then-lover, Martina Topley-Bird, sang them, including her reimagining of Public Enemy's militant 1988 rap "Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos," while other songs were male-female duets dealing with sex and love in oblique ways, over beds of sometimes dissonant samples. Within a year, Tricky had released two more full length albums which were considered even more challenging, without finding the same popularity as his Bristol contemporaries Massive Attack and Portishead. Through his brief collaborations with Bjork, however, he also exerted influence closer to the pop and alternative rock mainstream, and he developed a large cult fan base.

The London-based band Archive developed trip hop into progressive rock with elements of both hip hop and orchestral music recently with the album Controlling Crowds (Part I-III and Part IV).

Post-trip hop[link]

Björk, a recording artist who often incorporated trip hop in her albums and music.^[18][19][20]

After the success of Massive Attack, Portishead and Tricky albums in 1994 and 1995, a new generation of trip hop artists emerged with a more standardized sound.^{[citation needed]} Notable "post-trip-hop" artists include Esthero, Morcheeba, Sneaker Pimps, Alpha, Jaianto, Mudville and Cibo Matto. They integrated trip hop with other genres – including ambient, soul, IDM, experimental industrial, atmospheric drum n bass/jungle, liquid dubstep, breakbeat, drum 'n' bass, acid jazz, and new age. The first printed record for the use of the term "post-trip hop" was as late as October 2002 when British newspaper The Independent used it to describe Second Person and their hybrid sound.^{[citation needed]} Trip hop developed into a diversified genre that is no longer limited to the "deep, dark style" of the early years, eliminating the original impression of trip hop as "dark and gloomy".^{[citation needed]}

Trip hop has influenced artists outside the genre, including Gorillaz, Emancipator, Nine Inch Nails, Radiohead, Travis, How to Destroy Angels^[21], Beth Orton, The Flaming Lips, Bitter:Sweet, Beck, Deftones as well as Icelandic singer Björk, who utilized the genre throughout her 1995 album Post.^[22] Australian pop singer Kylie Minogue's 1997 album Impossible Princess featured strong trip hop styles on several tracks, as well as also mixing in sounds of rock and jazz^[23]

Musical aesthetics[link]

Dido Armstrong, a recording artist who has incorporated trip hop in her work.

Common musical aesthetics include a bass-heavy drumbeat, often emulating the slowed breakbeat samples typical of hip hop in the 1990s. Vocals in trip hop are often female and feature characteristics of various singing styles including R&B, jazz and rock. The female-dominant vocals of trip hop may be partially attributable to the influence of genres such as jazz and early R&B in which female vocalists were more common. However, there are notable exceptions; Massive Attack has collaborated with male and female singers. Tricky often features vocally in his own productions and Chris Corner provided vocals for late albums with his group Sneaker Pimps.

Trip hop is also known for its melancholy. This may be partly due to the fact that several acts were inspired by post punk bands; Tricky and Massive Attack both covered and sampled songs of Siouxsie and the Banshees^[24][25] and The Cure.^[26][27] Tricky opened his second album Nearly God by a version of "Tattoo", a pre-trip-hop song of Siouxsie and the Banshees.^[28]

Trip hop tracks often sample Rhodes pianos, saxophones, trumpets, and flutes. Trip hop differs from hip hop in theme and overall tone. Instead of gangsta rap with its hard-hitting lyrics, trip hop offers a more aural atmospherics with instrumental hip hop, turntable scratching, and breakbeat rhythms. Regarded^{[by whom?]} in some ways as a 90s update of fusion, trip hop may be said to 'transcend' the hardcore rap styles and lyrics with atmospheric overtones to create a more mellow tempo that has less to do with black American urbanite attitude and more to do with a middle-class British impression of hip hop.^{[citation needed]} As Simon Reynolds put it, "trip hop is merely a form of gentrification."^[29]

Trip hop production is historically lo-fi, relying on analogue recording equipment and instrumentation, although more traditional instruments such as electric guitars and drum kits are common features. Portishead, for example, record their material to old tape from real instruments, and then sample their recordings, rather than recording their instruments directly to a track^{[citation needed]}. They also tend to put their drums through considerable compression.^{[citation needed]}

See also[link]

• Chill-out music
• Industrial hip-hop
• List of electronic music genres

References[link]

^[15]

External links[link]

• "Trip Hop Radio" Internet radio
• "Trip-Hop" Allmusic guide essay by Sean Cooper
• "World of Trip Hop" Webpage
• NPR's history of trip hop

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Nightmares on Wax
Background information
Birth name	George Evelyn
Also known as	DJ EASE
Origin	Yorkshire, England
Genres	Electronic, acid house, trip hop, downtempo, chill-out music
Occupations	Musician
Years active	1988–present
Labels	Warp Records, WAX ON Records
Website	www.nightmaresonwax.com
Members
George Evelyn, Robin Taylor-Firth, Chris Dawkins
Past members
Kevin Harper

George Evelyn, better known as Nightmares on Wax and also known as DJ EASE (Experimental Sample Expert), is a DJ and electronic music composer from Leeds, UK. His music is released on Warp Records and was one of the first releases on the label. Evelyn got his start in the music industry through an interest in hip hop and on joining a local breakdancing crew. He met Kevin Harper and together they released their first album in 1991, a techno-edged record entitled "A Word Of Science: The First And Final Chapter". This was the beginning of NoW's career. Today, Harper is a solo DJ and Evelyn is accompanied by Robin Taylor-Firth and has created a sound that is not classifiable, a "sound of the beats is what makes nightmares."^[1]

It is not a coincidence that the name Nightmares on Wax is an acronym for NOW, as they describe their music as "the sound of N.O.W." to exemplify the raw honesty and artistic freedom. George elaborates, "Today’s music is inspired by whatever has gone on before. That’s what fascinates me. Soul music is the earliest form of hip hop. That’s why I want to create it. It might seem like recreating what was done in the past, but what I want to do is merge soul and hip hop together. That’s why I’ll bring in the live aspect of what happened back then into current hip hop trends. That’s the angle I’m arriving at."^[2]

Early career[link]

Before the popularity of Nightmares on Wax, George Evelyn was raised listening to soul music. His father and sister specifically led him to be influenced by Quincy Jones and Curtis Mayfield. Later, as rap music became more popular, he was fascinated by the likes of Rappers Delight and Buffalo Gals. In 1988, DJ EASE was joined a breakdance crew where he grew close to Kevin Harper. They created a team today known as Nightmares on Wax. "We wanted to do tracks that had hip hop beats but experimented with ideas”. This technique is used by many other artists including The Forgemasters, LFO, and Unique 3.

In 1991, NoW released A Word Of Science: The First And Final Chapter. The album was built in Leeds, where Evelyn compiled the samples that were recorded on two sets of tapes. To explain his process, Evelyn described NoW’s composition strategies stating, “I just built the tracks around these ideas that I’ve had for the last four years. The only thing that changed was bringing in live musicians and editing.”^[1]

A change in direction[link]

After A Word of Science, Nightmares disappeared from the music scene for a four-year hiatus as promised in the sub title "The First and Final Chapter." Evelyn went on to run The Headz Club in Leeds. At this time, he also developed their record label, Poverty Records. He returned to the artistic side of the music industry with a track on the Mo' Wax Headz compilation.^[3] The next Nightmares on Wax album release was Smokers Delight in 1995, by which time Harper had left to pursue a career in DJing. Evelyn was joined on keyboards and programming by Robin Taylor-Firth with whom he began to record more of his trademark chill-out tracks. He brought in a variety of musicians, writers, vocalists, and rappers, giving the music a greater variety as well as allowing him to take the band out on tour. This album was also a breakthrough into the American market. Carboot Soul was the first album to be domestically distributed through US label, Matador Records.^[3] The album featured underground soul singer Sara Winton, Hamlet Luton on Bass, Chris Dawkins on guitar, and Robin Taylor-Firth on keyboards with the Pure Strings Orchestra harmonizing on strings. EASE is credited for his role in the mixing of the music as well as producer along with Glyn Poole. Bruce Wood is credited as the engineer of the album. These musicians became known as the band called Nightmares on Wax and defined their live sound on their 1999 tour.^[4]

This was a change for NoW, as they began as a DJ based group. Their new found contribution of live musicians allowed for a the group to operate more like a band than a studio act. The drum machine however, was not replaced with a live musician, remaining true to its original technology based tracks. No longer in partnership with Kevin Harper, Evelyn had the opportunity to expand and better what he and Kevin Harper started. He explains that “Doing the live side proves there is more to the music. People have something more tangible to relate the music to and it gives us the chance to connect with the audience. Also I’ve always had this idea of creating a big band – which is what we call our sound. The main priority for NoW is to prove that we can perform music. But we’re not ignoring the fact that we come from a studio, technical background. We just want to mix the old with the new. That’s why, at the moment, I don’t have a live drummer. The sound of the beats is what makes Nightmares.”^{[citation needed]}

Music business[link]

After Carboot Soul, NoW did not release another album until 2002. In the meantime, Evelyn exchanged his artistic license for a business one and spent the next several years concentrating on establishing himself as a producer and musical consultant before returning to the creative side of the industry.

In 2000, Evelyn assisted in the comeback of hip hop pioneers De La Soul, when they appeared on the EP The Sound of N.O.W.. That same year, Evelyn produced a Studio: K7 mixtape called DJ Kicks.

In 2005, Evelyn started his own independent record label, "WAX ON Records". Taylor-Firth followed in his band mate's footsteps and also started his own label named BlancoMusic.

Return to music composition and mixing[link]

In 2002, Evelyn released his fourth LP under Warp Records, Mind Elevation. He continued to evolve his new label and build a network of artists.

Four years later in March 2006, NoW released their fifth LP, In a Space Outta Sound again on Warp Records.^[3] When addressed about the amount of time between the records, Evelyn expressed his distaste for schedules, joking that they made him break out in a rash. To keep in the spirit of network's mantra, Evelyn explains that NoW is very focused on allowing things to happen and not forcing albums into production.^[5]

In 2008, NoW released their final LP under Warp titled thought so.... In 2009, Coming Home was released, this time under WAX ON Records.

Recent activity[link]

In 2009, Nightmares on Wax toured the United States stopping in eleven cities in January and February.

DJ Ease was then nominated for DJ of the year 2010^{[citation needed]}.

Today, George Evelyn continues to expand his music and both his business endeavors.

Discography[link]

• A Word of Science: The First and Final Chapter (September 16, 1991)
• Smokers Delight (September 25, 1995) #84 UK
• Carboot Soul (December 4, 1999) #71 UK
• DJ-Kicks: Nightmares on Wax (October 2, 2000) (DJ mix album)
• Mind Elevation (September 2, 2002) #47 UK
• Late Night Tales: Nightmares on Wax (May 12, 2003) (DJ mix album)
• In a Space Outta Sound (March 7, 2006) #93 UK
• thought so... Ricky Ranking and Ella May, Chyna Brown. (August 25, 2008) UK #135^[6]
• Coming Home (2009)

See also[link]

• Late Night Tales
• DJ-Kicks

References[link]

External links[link]

• Official NOW site
• NOW on charts
• BlancoMusic
• BudNubac, Taylor-Firth's side-project
• warp.net NOW page