Music Genre: Trip Hop

Trip-hop mutated from the U.K house scene’s experimental underground in the early 90’s. The English music press came up with term to categorise an emerging amalgamation of jazz, ambient, techno, breakbeat, and perhaps most importantly, downtempo, into a new genre. The genre saw its rise through labels such as Ninja Tune, Wall of Sound, and Mo’Wax.

As the “hop” implies, trip-top is somewhat similar to American hip-hop, using sampled drum breaks and a heavy insistence on rhythm, although trip-hop is often without vocals. The “trip” in the genre’s namesake suggests the ambient-leaning, psychedelic tonality of its sound. Under the steady rhythms is usually an undertow of gauzy, deep, otherworldly synth pads and indistinct melodies. Most “real” instruments, if present at all, are subsumed into the hazy, deep-sea atmospherics. Trip-hop’s sound is characteristically drenched in reverb, delays and mid-to-bottom heavy productions. The only top-end your likely to hear are the snaps of snare drums, or the light tapping of hi-hats. Not surprisingly, themes of sex and sexuality, drugs, and other forms of hedonistic pleasure feature prominently, although admittedly, it’s not as much a genre to be listened to as felt.

For me growing up, trip-hop presented a sexy, laid back, undeniably cool and otherworldly sound that 90’s Australian rock bands, such as Something For Kate, Jebediah and Rhubarb, weren’t offering. I somewhat-erroneously associated trip-hop with the rain-slicked mean streets of London. There was something metropolitan about trip-hop, something urban, dirty and slick at the same time. In actual fact, two of the genre’s leading bands, Massive Attack and Portishead, formed in the rural coastlines of Bristol, although it’s still hard for me not to hear trip-hop as representing the seedy underbelly of a cold, damp, bustling city. Oh well. Although I was wrong about the origins, the rhythms are undeniable. I hope you enjoy them.

To demonstrate the genre, I’ve chosen to include a link to Massive Attack’s “Risingson” from Mezzanine, an album I picked up from a Cash Converters on a trip to Frankston with my family and played on repeat for months.

I also made a trip-hop remix of a “Sardines”, a song by Australian artist Michelle Moyle. Here’s a link: