Bristol trip hop12/25/2023 Rhodes, too, took inspiration in the breakbeat collage of rave. It was exciting it felt like a new sound was coming out of the UK every three days.” The drum’n’bass thing, the jungle thing, that was all born out of the same set of influences. “But,” he says, “in the UK we’re really good at taking something and making it our own, and when I think about that whole 90s period, it was exciting: we were doing that whole downtempo thing, but fused with all that other exciting electronic shit that was happening at the same time. He regarded his early rave tunes as hip-hop collage in the tradition of instrumentals by Mantronix, Marley Marl, DJ Red Alert and co. Evelyn grew up with reggae soundsystem culture and was a hip-hop and electro fanatic, who breakdanced competitively as a teen. To understand the durability of these sounds, it’s worth looking at some of the objections to the way they were labelled. Liam Howe has passed on the trip-hop gene to FKA twigs, Lana Del Rey and Adele. “Then of course you start thinking: am I that old?” “It’s interesting that whole era’s come round again,” says Evelyn, remarking on the extraordinary Afghan-German producer Farhot’s similarity to DJ Shadow. Even UK drill is demonstrating a connection, in the album False Hope by Tara Mills, with music by drill and road rap producer Carns Hill. Homebrew “lo fi” remixes of anime and game themes, which could easily pass as trip-hop, regularly clock up tens of millions of streams on YouTube, as do streams of trip-hoppy “beats to study/chill/sleep to”. A lot of the new UK soul and jazz, from Jorja Smith through Children of Zeus to Moses Boyd and Sault, is distinctly trip-hoppy Arlo Parks’ Mercury prize-winning album is steeped in it, as is tattooed, cosmic dub-soul provocateur Greentea Peng. In the leftfield, acts such as Young Echo, Tirzah and Space Afrika explore some oddly familiar dark, dubby spaces, the latter citing Tricky as a key precedent. Alicia Keys’ new single, Best of Me, couldn’t be more trip-hop if it was made in a smoky Bristol basement in 1995. Some of the most high-profile acts in the world – Billie Eilish, Lana Del Rey, Lorde – are unabashed in these 90s references. Jhelisa, whose albums in the 90s easily bridged the gap between trip-hop and acid jazz, is back and on spectacularly trippy form with 7 Keys V.2, too.Īnd perhaps even more significantly, younger musicians are channelling the sound. Martina Topley-Bird’s Forever I Wait (featuring several productions by Robert “3D” Del Naja of Massive Attack), the reformed Sneaker Pimps’ Squaring the Circle, and even Saint Etienne’s mostly instrumental I’ve Been Trying to Tell You all meander moodily in classic trip-hop style. Nightmares on Wax’s new album, Shout Out! To Freedom …, shows producer George Evelyn as committed to cosmic beats, and as inspired, as ever, and Smokers Delight got a deluxe reissue treatment last year. Photograph: Dwayne Boydīut whatever you call it, the specifically 90s downtempo vibe abides. Jhelisa Anderson found in the UK ‘a version of modern blues, a depth and darkness’.
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