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The 50 best trip-hop albums of all time

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Illustration by: Mat Pringle

Like it or not, trip-hop is a thing. I say this as someone who, for the past 18 odd years, has loved the music just as much as I’ve hated the term.

Coined in June 1994 by Andy Pemberton in a feature for Mixmag , trip-hop was used to describe the recent stylistic shift of the Mo’ Wax label and that music’s popularity in dance circles, particularly in after hours sessions. Pemberton heralded trip-hop as a psychedelic take on hip-hop and the first valid alternative to America’s dominance of the music.

The DNA of trip-hop was more complex than its reduction to bite-sized adjectives. One strand came from hip-hop, which had fed the musical imagination of a new generation for over a decade, while another strand came from rave, which had provided further stylistic possibilities with its fusion of drum machines, breaks, samples and synthesisers. Sound systems, digging, dub, chill-out rooms, early globalisation and technology also acted like so many molecules attaching themselves to a new idea of what hip-hop could be. Trip-hop was a logical evolution in a decade during which everyone came down from a partying high to face the reality that hip-hop and dance music were being co-opted by the mainstream; dreams of a new sonic utopia crushed by the relentless onslaught of capitalism.

Just as techno had become a synonym for dance music, trip-hop soon became a crutch for journalists and marketers wanting to signify hip-hop without rappers. Most notably, it became a byword for the Bristol sound epitomised by bands like Massive Attack and Portishead. In 1998, The New York Times retconned Massive Attack’s debut album Blue Lines as the so-called genre’s inception point.

On the ground, the sound did resonate in a genuine way among a new generation of musicians seeking freedom to experiment. In London, Ninja Tune played yin to Mo’ Wax’s yang. Both labels crafted a unique visual dimension and assembled expansive rosters. In Paris, DJ Cam pushed out his own blunted beats to eager continental heads. In Austria, Kruder & Dorfmeister added an extra layer of dub and turned trip-hop into downbeat in a haze of weed paranoia. In New York City, a loosely linked group of artists, thinkers and musicians spread from downtown Manhattan to Brooklyn’s cheap warehouses to imagine their own version of the sound, which The Wire magazine dubbed illbient. No matter the names or the execution, the DNA was the same.

It was always going to end badly. Mo’ Wax, often seen as responsible for the sound, originally kicked off riding the acid-jazz wave, a sound that soon exhausted itself into a creative cul-de-sac. By the late 1990s, trip-hop had become nothing more than limp, often stoner-friendly, coffee table hip-hop beats. It was music for people who felt rap was too dangerous. To those who believed in it though, it always held a promise of things weird and wonderful.

Alongside IDM (another etymological faux pas from the 1990s), trip-hop presaged the beat scene of the late 2000s, a continuation of the ideas and aesthetic it first articulated. When I spoke to Daddy Kev in 2012, he pointed to Mo’ Wax as one of the key influences for Low End Theory. Flying Lotus has cited DJ Krush as an influence. And tastemakers like Gilles Peterson have championed the music’s evolution across decades.

In putting together this list, we tried to take all of this into account. There is no purism to indulge in, because there is nothing pure about trip-hop. As DJ Food’s Strictly Kev put it recently, at its best the music was “psychedelic beat collages, usually instrumental, embracing samples, analogue electronics and dub FX.” The list is contained to the 1990s for historical accuracy and tries to steer away from the music’s strongholds to show the width and breadth of the sound. As such, you’ll find artists from France, Northern Ireland, Japan, America, Denmark and Brazil represented as well as releases from Asphodel, Wordsound, Rephlex, Warp and a handful of majors. It’s also worth noting that when an artist had multiple worthy albums (for instance, Portishead or Massive Attack), we only included their most definitive moment.

Listen to the whole list as a playlist via YouTube  or   Spotify .

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50. London Funk Allstars London Funk Volume 1 (Ninja Tune, 1995)

London Funk Allstars’ Ninja Tune debut will likely sound dated to most who come across it for the first time today. And yet, amid the simple breakbeats, classic loops and obvious vocal chops there’s a real beauty that captures the essence of a simpler time when the possibilities seemed endless and technology was providing new ways to think about music.

bomthebass

49. Bomb The Bass Clear (4th & Broadway, 1994)

Tim Simenon might not be the most obvious pick for a trip-hop list, but Clear exhibits plenty of the genre’s hallmarks. Tossing away the rave collage aesthetic that had made ‘Beat Dis’ such a massive success, Simenon weaves an ambitious narrative, tying together dub and hip-hop-influenced tracks with heady spoken-word clips from writers Benjamin Zephaniah and Will Self. There are also notable contributions from influential figures such as Leslie Winer (if you haven’t heard her 1993 album Witch , you should seek it out immediately), Bernard Fowler and Bim Sherman, opening up a dialogue between New York, Jamaica and the UK that would remain at the center of the genre for years to come.

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48. Slicker Confidence in Duber (Hefty, 1998)

John Hughes’s Chicago-based Hefty imprint was crucial in cementing the relationship between Chicago’s burgeoning post-rock scene (led by Tortoise) and the seemingly more experimental (and more European) IDM and trip-hop genres. This union would reach its peak in 2001 with Telefon Tel Aviv’s massive Fahrenheit Fair Enough , but a few years prior, Hughes himself was making similar strides under his Slicker moniker. Confidence in Duber sits firmly alongside Scott Herren’s early Delarosa & Asora experiments, snatching the breaks ‘n’ blunts from trip-hop and injecting them with digital belches cribbed from the IDM playbook. Oddly enough, it’s aged better than you might expect, and is well worthy of re-investigation.

meatbeatmanifesto

47. Meat Beat Manifesto Subliminal Sandwich (Interscope, 1996)

Subliminal Sandwich is Meat Beat Manifesto’s fourth album and their first on a major label via Nothing Records, a subsidiary of Interscope helmed by Trent Reznor that was intended to capitalise on the success of Nine Inch Nails. The album proved a critical and commercial flop, though it remains an interesting offering, drawing links between trip-hop, dub, industrial and ambient with a touch of psychedelia. Split across two CDs, it’s the first half that’s of most interest here as the rest focused on drone and ambient compositions. The 18 tracks draw heavily on samples and breaks combined with pulsing basslines, heavily processed vocals and an overall gritty finish that makes it sound like the bastard child of Mo’ Wax and Bill Laswell’s Axiom Records.

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46. 9 Lazy 9 Paradise Blown (Ninja Tune, 1994)

Early Ninja Tune beatmakers 9 Lazy 9 might not sound as crucial now as they did back in the mid 1990s, but there’s still fun to be had on Paradise Blown , their second album. The Italy-based group (including Funki Porcini’s James Braddell) added a distinctly light-hearted lounge quality to a genre that could often dwell in the darker crevices, and as such  Paradise Blown can be filed alongside offerings from Tim ‘Love’ Lee and Tipsy, even if it’s not anywhere near as endearingly experimental.

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45. UNKLE Psyence Fiction (Mo’ Wax, 1998)

Mo’ Wax boss James Lavelle’s pet project, UNKLE, remains a controversial part of the trip-hop canon. With distance, Psyence Fiction is possibly more enjoyable than it was back in 1998, and it highlights the genre’s crossover potential with guest spots from Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, The Verve’s Richard Ashcroft (then riding high after the success of ‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’) and Badly Drawn Boy, but it’s hard not to see it as a slightly cynical marketing exercise. DJ Shadow, who was drafted to co-write the album, was quick to speak out about his unhappiness with both the process and the result, but Psyence Fiction is representative of a time and place, and shows trip-hop’s promise as it was being co-opted and transformed into something that labels could whitewash and monetize. Zero 7 was just around the corner.

tipsy

44. Tipsy Trip Tease – The Seductive Sounds of Tipsy (Asphodel, 1996)

It might be a stretch to classify Tipsy as trip-hop, but the Californian duo of Tim Digulla and David Gardner certainly used many of the same tools as their European peers. Pillaging loops from a wide variety of lounge and exotica records, Digulla and Gardner came up with a dusty, defiant and undoubtedly downbeat look at sound collage. Since it veered away from obvious breaks and beats, Trip Tease actually holds up markedly better than some other records of the era, and ends up sounding closer in style to David Holmes, with a smoky, cinematic quality.

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43. Justin Warfield Field Trip To Planet 9 (Qwest, 1993)

Released a year before the term trip-hop was coined in Mixmag , Justin Warfield’s first and only solo album is included here largely thanks to Strictly Kev, who recently pointed out its relevance  with regard to the music’s supposed psychedelic properties. My Field Trip To Planet 9 is a rap album, cut from the same cloth as Check Your Head -era Beastie Boys and Digable Planets. But remove its vocals and behold music that sounds like it wouldn’t be out of place on Mo’ Wax or Ninja Tune a few years later. At its best, trip-hop was music for b-boys on acid, as Warfield sang on the album’s single. A year later, he provided the vocals for Bomb The Bass’s ‘Bug Powder Dust’, another bonafide rap-on-acid classic that got the trip-hop treatment via Paris’s La Funk Mob and Vienna’s Kruder & Dorfmeister.

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42. Smith & Mighty Bass Is Maternal (More Rockers/!K7, 1995)

You can’t have a conversation about trip-hop without mentioning Bristol, and you can’t talk about the Bristol scene without giving a nod to Smith & Mighty. The West Country duo took soundsystem culture and a hefty scoop of the ideas informing an increasingly popular jungle scene and helped formulate an entire sound. Without them, Portishead, Tricky and Massive Attack simply wouldn’t sound the same. Bass Is Maternal is the best representation of their scope, and illustrates their experimentation as they attempted to summarize the meeting point between UK rave culture and Jamaican dub. It’s not always successful, but to ignore it is to disregard an important chapter in British musical history.

dj-vadim

41. DJ Vadim U.S.S.R Repertoire (The Theory of Verticality) (Ninja Tune, 1996)

The first of Vadim’s four albums for Ninja Tune, U.S.S.R Repertoire is a weeded-out take on an American musical form by a Russian immigrant living in the English capital – an instrumental microcosm of hip-hop’s globalisation. Beneath a layer of simplicity, there is depth to Vadim’s approach; the beats feel expansive, the music inviting the listener to cradle in the grooves of the breaks and warmth of the bass. Much of this debut also acts as an echo of what Wordsound and We™ were doing across the ocean at the same time. As Vadim’s 1995 debut on his own Jazz Fudge imprint proclaimed, heads weren’t ready.

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40. Funki Porcini Hed Phone Sex (Ninja Tune, 1995)

After a decade penning film and TV music in Italy, British producer James Braddell decided to head to London and set up his own studio, where he would use some of his commercial writing tricks to come up with Funki Porcini, one of the most recognizable names on Ninja Tune’s early roster. This was trip-hop with a side helping of very English humour, from the moniker itself to the record’s awkwardly suggestive cover. Musically, Braddell laid out a template that would be traced over for years to come with his combination of dusty hip-hop rhythms and booming dub bass. The swirling, reverb-drenched samples just added an extra layer of thick smoke to an already bloodshot premise.

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39. Red Snapper Prince Blimey (Warp, 1996)

If the elephant in the room here is acid jazz, Red Snapper are one of the rare acts who addressed it head-on. Prince Blimey is their first full-length and is certainly more overtly jazzy than most of the records we’ve highlighted on this list. That’s not a negative though, the trio – a bassist, guitarist and drummer – had genuine chops, and managed to inject their musical training into a more contemporary mode, touching on trip-hop and drum & bass without ever sounding forced. It’s a concoction that might now sound too close to the coffee table dreck that sat next to a copy of American Psycho and a rolled up tenner at the close of the millennium, but Red Snapper managed, somehow, to keep things edgy and unusual. They even, somewhat inexplicably, ended up touring with The Prodigy.

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38. Various Artists DJ Kicks: Kruder & Dorfmeister (!K7, 1996)

Despite becoming the figureheads of Austria’s downbeat scene (a continental take on trip-hop), Viennese duo Kruder & Dorfmeister never released an album. Instead it was through their debut EP, G-Stoned , and absurdly popular mix CDs that they accrued fame. Their 1996 contribution to !K7’s DJ-Kicks series captured the sweet spot between the blunted grooves of chill-out rooms and the rolling breaks of jungle, an approach they’d refine two years later on The K&D Sessions . K&D’s arrival on the scene came at a time when trip-hop had started to resemble a safe version of hip-hop for those seeking thrills without effort, and their mixes remain as close as you can get to the bland, coffee table take on the genre without feeling too sick.

wagonchrist

37. Wagon Christ Throbbing Pouch (Rising High Records, 1994)

With releases under a variety of aliases on seminal labels like Ninja Tune, Mo’ Wax, Planet Mu and Rephlex throughout the 1990s, Luke Vibert is one of the artists that best connects the dots between the various styles and ideas that fed into trip-hop. His second release as Wagon Christ pieces together elements from hip-hop, the burgeoning UK dance music scene and electro into a colourful sonic puzzle that glides along in splendid fashion. Or as Select put it at the time, “the missing link between Aphex Twin and Mo’ Wax.”

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36. Tim ‘Love’ Lee Confessions of a Selector (Tummy Touch, 1997)

As boss of the Tummy Touch label, Tim ‘Love’ Lee had an important part to play in the development of downbeat and trip-hop, not least thanks to his discovery of future genre stars Groove Armada, but the less said about that the better. Confessions of a Selector might be his finest achievement, not quite reaching fully into the trip-hop cookie jar, instead relying on Lee’s estimable crate digging expertise. The hallmarks of the genre are there, but prettied up with luscious tropical vistas and an eccentric (but smart) cut-and-paste quality that isn’t a million miles from US duo Tipsy.

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35. Psychonauts Time Machine (Mo’ Wax, 1998)

Psychonauts were Mo’ Wax’s secret weapon, so much so that James Lavelle had them provide mixes under his name – ghost mixed, if you will. Time Machine was his payment for services rendered, and it’s a fine document of the era, not only rounding up some of Mo’ Wax’s finest moments, but also showing just how important turntablism and truly creative mixing was to the scene’s development. Most songs don’t get more than a minute of air time as the duo power through almost 50 tracks in half an hour, blending together cuts from genre luminaries DJ Krush, Luke Vibert, DJ Shadow, La Funk Mob and more. If you need a quick-to-digest taster of the genre, this is as good as it gets.

princepaul

34. Prince Paul Psychoanalysis (What Is It?) (Wordsound, 1996)

We can already hear the furious typing of wronged hip-hop heads asking with disgust why Prince Paul is even on this list. Psychoanalysis is here for a bunch of reasons: it was originally released by Wordsound, a label most associated (wrongly or not) with illbient, NYC’s answer to trip-hop; it’s a rare example of a fully instrumental hip-hop album from a city that, in the 1990s, had no time for anything that didn’t have rappers on it (Skiz Fernando Jr., who ran the label, recounted stories of Fat Beats refusing to stock the album at the time); and it’s basically 15 tracks of Prince Paul taking his whole skit philosophy to its most absurd conclusion. For all these reasons and more, Psychoanalysis remains a slept-on classic from the 1990s, a half-way point between trip-hop’s European roots and its infatuation with American hip-hop.

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33. The Herbalizer Blow Your Headphones (Ninja Tune, 1997)

Jake Wherry and Ollie Teeba’s The Herbalizer project was a fine example of trip-hop’s most visible back-and-forth with “proper” hip-hop. They weren’t afraid to work with emcees, and on Blow Your Headphones , their second album, they found a kindred spirit in Natural Resource’s What? What?, now better known as Jean Grae. She added an important element to Wherry and Teeba’s jazz-flecked backdrops, and while it’s certainly true that many of trip-hop’s consumers were looking for a safer alternative to charged US rap, The Herbalizer walked the tightrope admirably, and were markedly more successful in bridging the genres than many of their peers, who buckled when attempting to integrate emcees.

thebug

32. The Bug Tapping the Conversation (Wordsound, 1997)

Another release that will likely raise a few eyebrows for its inclusion, The Bug’s debut album nonetheless fits within the wider idea of what trip-hop could, and should, be about. There are a few other reasons too: it was released on Wordsound; DJ Vadim provided the drum samples; and, like the best trip-hop releases of the 1990s, it was a soundtrack for life, with the listener invited to let their mind fill in the blanks. The blend of hip-hop, dub and industrial influences that would go on to characterise Martin’s work is found here at its rawest and tracks like ‘Those Tapes Are Dangerous’ show a darker side to trip-hop’s blunted potential.

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31. Neotropic Mr Brubaker’s Strawberry Alarm Clock (Ntone, 1998)

Riz Maslen is often more widely associated with electronica (no doubt thanks to her early association with Future Sound of London), but her second Neotropic album Mr Brubaker’s Strawberry Alarm Clock is one of the trip-hop era’s hidden gems. The record appeared on the Ninja Tune sister label Ntone, and is one of the few full-lengths on this list that still sounds truly bizarre and alien. On top of the usual dusty breaks, Maslen lavished elements absorbed from IDM’s palette but left behind its seemingly random, artificial bent. The conversation between trip-hop and IDM was very visible in the late 90s – Plaid being the most obvious example – but Maslen avoided many of the trappings of both scenes, emerging with a record that was probably “too future” for most beatheads.

www.mowax.weebly.com

30. Various Artists Headz (A Soundtrack Of Experimental Beathead Jams.) (Mo’ Wax, 1994)

After a forgettable false start peddling iffy acid jazz, Mo’ Wax made a stylistic shift in 1994, kickstarting a four-year period that continues to resonate two decades on. The first Headz compilation is a neat 18-track digest of that transition, a declaration of what was to come. Influences, ambitions and comments on the status quo of the time are found in the slowed down grooves and samples as well as the track titles: ‘Ravers Suck Our Sound’, ‘Contemplating Jazz’, ‘In Flux’, ‘The Time Has Come’. The titular beatheads may have seemed like a stoned, uncreative bunch at the time but their aesthetic has proven resilient. Alongside obvious names like DJ Shadow, La Funk Mob and R.P.M, Headz also featured Nightmares On Wax, Autechre, Howie B. and various members of Major Force.

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29. Various Artists Eleven Phases (Sublime, 1998)

Eleven Phases is a true gem, a little-known compilation of downtempo and instrumental tracks from many of Detroit’s finest techno artists including Robert Hood, Kenny Larkin, Eddie Fowlkes and Anthony Shakir. Originally released in Japan only, the compilation makes for a fascinating snapshot of the hip-hop roots and leanings of the city’s dance music pioneers. Will Web’s ‘Cosmic Kung-Fu Funk’ slows down techno’s rawness to a blunted, hip-hop-influenced slouch while Robert Hood’s ‘Mystique’ wouldn’t be out of place on a !K7 compilation. Despite emerging entirely outside of the 1990s trip-hop world, Eleven Phases shows how the core ideas and principles of the aesthetic bled into various scenes and cities throughout the decade.

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28. Solex Solex vs. Hitmeister (Matador, 1998)

It makes sense that one of the best (and weirdest) records in a genre that deifies crate diggers should come from a record store owner. Elisabeth Esselink’s debut album was hard to categorize when it landed in 1998, there were elements pilfered from plenty of genres but not really enough of one or the other for categorization. Not only this, but Solex vs. Hitmeister emerged on the Matador label, then best known for releasing indie records. It was certainly aimed at a different crowd from the usual green-thumbed beatheads with a complete collection of Mo’ Wax 12″s and a line of Gundam figurines on their desk, and that was a good thing. Esselink was a breath of fresh air, and Solex vs. Hitmeister ‘s peculiar charms still resonate as she tangles her voice through hiccuping collages of unwieldy samples and collapsing drum machine loops.

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27. Various Artists Funkjazztical Tricknology (Ninja Tune, 1995)

Released in 1995, the first Ninja Tune compilation arrived between the two Headz volumes from Mo’ Wax, providing a perfect counterpoint that showed how similar yet different the London powerhouses were at the time. Focused largely on early Ninja artists such as 9 Lazy 9, The Herbaliser, Coldcut and DJ Food, it also features appearance from Austria’s downbeat kings Kruder & Dorfmeister and Attica Blues, who had just joined Mo’ Wax. As with the first Headz volume, Funkjazztical Tricknology also marked the beginning of a shift for Ninja Tune with its releases becoming essential not just for the music but also their design, packaging and words of in-house scribe Shane Solanki, who invented the Ninjaspeak that played into the label’s growing mythos.

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26. DJ Food Recipe For Disaster (New Breed, 1995)

No other artist embodies Ninja Tune quite like DJ Food, the multifaceted DJ project set up in the early days of the label by its founders, Coldcut. As its name implies, DJ Food was set up to provide DJs with the necessary ingredients to do their thing. For the first five years, the collective – Coldcut, Strictly Kev and PC – released loops and other tools via the Jazz Brakes series, some of which is great, while some is just as forgettable as the more tepid early Mo’ Wax releases. In 1995, DJ Food went for a meatier offering with their debut album, A Recipe For Disaster . Using the same approach that had made their Solid Steel mixes and live appearances unmissable, they pieced together 16 tracks that veer from downtempo moody to breakbeat furious and proved that they knew their way around the trip-hop kitchen just as well as the best of them.

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25. DJ Krush & Toshinori Kondo Ki Oku (Apollo, 1996)

The collision of avant-garde jazz and trip-hop was bound to happen. Experimental players throughout the world were desperate to open up a conversation with younger producers, and trip-hop (as well as drum & bass) was an obvious crash-pad, considering its liberal pilfering of the genre via sampling. Ki Oku is one of the best examples of this collision, despite trumpeter Toshinori Kondo turning in a surprisingly straightforward performance throughout. (This is a musician who had gone head to head with Peter Brötzmann and John Zorn – we weren’t exactly expecting him to toot out a cover of Bob Marley’s ‘Sun Is Shining’.) But it works. What could, in the wrong hands, have been one of the worst abuses of both jazz and trip-hop tropes, is actually remarkably measured and incredibly listenable.

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24. We™ As Is. (Asphodel, 1997)

We™ formed by accident in the early 1990s after DJ Olive had been asked to contribute a track to Wordsound’s Certified Dope Vol.1 compilation for which he roped in fellow Brooklyn musicians Lloop and Once11. In the following years the trio became one of the emblematic acts of New York’s short-lived illbient scene, drunk off the possibilities afforded by the experiments that drove their creative ecosystem, where ambient, dub and hip-hop floated freely in a haze of smoke between cheap Brooklyn lofts and downtown squats. Their 1997 debut for Asphodel is a blistering run through hip-hop instrumentals, ambient lulls and drum & bass exercises that highlight the music’s chill-out roots and breakbeat fetish.

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23. Amon Tobin Bricolage (Ninja Tune, 1997)

Known for his virtuoso sound design and increasingly complicated A/V shows, Brazilian producer Amon Tobin might seem like an odd addition to a list of trip-hop albums, but bear with us. His second album Bricolage emerged from the dust of trip-hop, appearing on Ninja Tune and offering a view of the scene through cracked glass. Tobin provided a more precise (and, let’s be honest, less stoned) take on the trip-hop sound, absorbing drum & bass and IDM influences without batting an eyelid. The result is an accomplished midpoint between the edit-heavy trickery of Squarepusher and Aphex Twin and the moody soundscapes of Krush, Vibert and Shadow.

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22. Third Eye Foundation Semtex (Linda’s Strange Vacation, 1996)

Matt Elliott may have been a total outlier to most of the scenes that piled up to intersect at trip-hop, but Semtex is an example of how certain musicians could absorb familiar tropes without sacrificing originality. Elliott’s Third Eye Foundation debut fused breaks and booming sub bass with sounds more common to shoegaze: endless reverb, screaming and grizzled distortion. Traces of drum & bass (which would emerge more clearly on Elliott’s follow-up album Ghost ) slipped in-and-out of focus, and Semtex doesn’t really feel like part of one movement or another, rather adjacent and dizzy from ether and cheap draw. If anyone tries to tell you Bristol was just Portishead, Tricky and Roni Size, play ’em this burner.

attica

21. Attica Blues Attica Blues (Mo’ Wax, 1997)

Like many of the artists and albums featured in this list, Attica Blues is trip-hop thanks to the location and affiliations of its creators at the time. A trio composed of producers Charlie Dark (then D’Afro) and Tony Nwachukwu (of CD-R fame) alongside singer Roba El-Essawy, Attica Blues made jazz-influenced hip-hop that happened to have a woman singing on it instead of emcees rapping. In the 1990s, thanks to genre purism, that meant your shit wasn’t rap and therefore wasn’t hip-hop. Attica Blues is one of Mo’ Wax’s better and more slept-on full lengths, a deft exercise in sampling, programming and arranging, back when doing so took more than a few clicks of a mouse.

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The best trip-hop owed plenty both to the art of mixing and the cut-and-paste aesthetic of the 1980s, which is why a handful of releases on this list are mix CDs rather than albums. Cold Krush Cuts is a perfect example of how those two ideas influenced the music at its peak, and has the bonus of acting as a handshake between the two London labels most associated with the tag. Krush was Mo’ Wax’s Japanese weapon, and Coldcut and DJ Food were Ninja’s own zen masters of audio collage. The result is a still-classic double CD with the London boys arguably edging it thanks to a wide selection and craftsmanship reminiscent of their acclaimed Journeys By DJ entry; DJ Krush goes for the mind, limiting his selections to only six of Ninja Tune’s artists and slicing the cuts up in his trademark less-is-more approach.

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19. Depth Charge 9 Deadly Venoms (Vinyl Solution, 1994)

A natural progression from the movie-obsessed NY rap of Wu-Tang Clan et al, 9 Deadly Venoms used a backbone of cult film samples to underpin gritty hip-hop instrumentals that helped inform a fast-growing scene. This was the blueprint for the Mo’ Wax 12″s to come: music based around the kind of nerd fandom that in 1994 was still a counter-culture. It still plays like an authentic labour of love for Jonathan Saul Kane, as he blends chops from The Evil Dead and Dirty Harry with collapsing breaks and ominous textures – it’s hardly surprising that the producer ended up establishing a company to issue UK versions of Hong Kong action movies.

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18. Nearly God Nearly God (Island, 1996)

Described by Tricky as “a collection of brilliant, incomplete demos,” Nearly God is a bright, often-forgotten reminder of just how unmatched Tricky was in the 1990s. He called the record Nearly God , for fuck’s sake, and that wasn’t far from the truth. The album acted as a stop-gap between Tricky’s genre-defining Maxinquaye  and his difficult (but almost equally brilliant) about-turn, Pre-Millenium Tension . It stands apart simply because of its scope – there are appearances from regular collaborator Martina Topley-Bird, but also tracks with Alison Moyet, Björk, Siouxsie and the Banshees and Terry Hall. What sounds like it could have been a self-indulgent victory lap for (back then) one of the UK’s most notorious stars is somehow a coherent, exemplary document of a peculiar time in British music. Tricky also has to be commended for having the good sense to veto a collaboration with Damon Albarn (and then Suggs) which could have easily been the straw that broke the camel’s back.

skylab

17. Skylab #2: 1999 “Large As Life And Twice As Natural” (Eye Q , 1999)

Skylab was a short-lived collective composed of Matt Ducasse, Howie B and the Japanese duo of Tosh and Kudo, aka Love TKO from Major Force. They released two albums on Sven Vath’s Eye Q label before disappearing, and their work was among the better but lesser-known of the trip-hop era. Ducasse has gone on record to state that their attachment with the genre was unintentional and that he saw their work as “more expansive, […] more in common with collage music […] or soundtracks.” And yet, those ideas were also at the heart of what the best trip-hop could be. In many ways Skylab were not so different to Portishead in both their intentions and execution. Their second album was released just as the label folded, leading it disappear into the cracks of time until a reissue by Tummy Touch earlier this year. Howie B had left by this point, and vocalist Debbie Sanders joined the trio to craft a beautiful record which really goes out there and was praised by both critics and knowledgeable fans.

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16. Laika Silver Apples of the Moon (Too Pure, 1994)

Emerging from post-rock band Moonshake, Laika orbited the trip-hop genre without succumbing to many of its less flattering trappings. When guitarist and vocalist Margaret Fiedler commented in 1995 that her band was “just like trip-hop, but much much faster,” she was doing herself a massive disservice. A cursory listen might not even reveal too many obvious similarities – like Portishead, Laika were taking elements of post-rock, krautrock and certainly hip-hop to provide something reactionary, and different from the pervasive, laddish Britpop that was polluting the charts at the time. While their contemporaries Stereolab (and later, Broadcast) were experimenting with drum machines and synthesizers, Laika were integrating samples and a deep passion for jazz and dub. Silver Apples of the Moon is one of the most singular albums on this list, and one of the most rewarding.

nightmaresonwax

15. Nightmares on Wax Smokers Delight (Warp, 1995)

Few records from this era quite capture the nexus of styles that trip-hop could represent at its best than Nightmares On Wax’s second album for Warp. Pulling from the same influences that defined the late 1980s rave explosion, Smokers Delight reconfigured the UK’s summer of love for the Discman generation while remaining just as suited to chill-out room comedowns or Ibiza sunset sessions.

reqone

14. REQ One (Skint, 1997)

Sure, Skint might still be best known for breaking Fatboy Slim, but don’t turn away just yet. Brighton-based producer (and sometime graf writer) REQ offered up one of the most blunted takes on the genre, almost by accident. His compositions didn’t pander to the popularity of the growing trip-hop scene, instead dwelling in a noisy, near-ambient back room. He made hip-hop instrumentals that sounded like they were being beamed in from a parallel universe via 14.4kbps modem, and in doing so, avoided being both pigeonholed and, well, popular. His brilliant debut album One has barely dated, fitting as well alongside DJ Spooky or even Dälek as it does anything the Bristol scene had to offer. One sounds, at times, like an MPC tumbling down a distant stairwell into a muddy lake, and we couldn’t think of a better recommendation than that.

crooklyn

13. Crooklyn Dub Consortium Certified Dope Vol.1 (Wordsound, 1995)

Skiz Fernando Jr.’s Wordsound label was in many ways the dubbed-out New York answer to Mo’ Wax, a home for what its founder coined dub-hop: music that blended the dusty boom bap that ruled the city at the time with the mixing desk mysticism of Jamaican dub. Certified Dope Vol.1 was Fernando’s attempt at cataloguing the music of like-minded artists who populated the Greenpoint and Williamsburg neighbourhoods in the early 1990s, including the likes of We™, Dr. Israel and Bill Laswell. Swinging like a pendulum between full-on dub and head-nod instrumentals, the compilation was one of the first to highlight the parallels between hip-hop’s sampling aesthetic and Jamaica’s dub.

djkrushmeiso

12. DJ Krush Meiso (Mo’ Wax / Sony, 1995)

I imagine that choosing a favourite DJ Krush album is a little like asking parents to pick their favourite kid. A perfectionist who infused an American cultural import with the meticulousness of his own culture, the Japanese producer was the Far East’s answer to DJ Shadow, and together they would become Mo’ Wax’s flagship artists. On Meiso he dug for samples and looped them with the same precision, sensitivity and attention to detail as the finest calligrapher or ukiyo-e artist. The addition of CL Smooth, The Roots’ Black Thought and Malik B as well as Big Shug and Guru showed that trip-hop’s instrumental aesthetic could also provide the backdrop for some fine rap moments.

davidholmes

11. David Holmes Let’s Get Killed (Go! Beat, 1997)

For his second album, Belfast’s David Holmes walked around New York on acid recording voices and sounds. The results were weaved into the music for Let’s Get Killed which, like his 1995 debut, acts as a sort of soundtrack for an imaginary movie. The process also resulted in one of the best albums of the era – a psychedelic collage of rhythms, textures and styles that jumps between hip-hop, dub and dance music and rests on the back of Holmes’ urban trip.  Let’s Get Killed  has aged gracefully and still sounds just as engrossing as it did nearly 20 years ago.

djspooky

10. DJ Spooky Songs of a Dead Dreamer (Asphodel, 1996)

Say what you like about Spooky and his over-explanation (those liner notes) and academic slant, Songs of a Dead Dreamer might sound better now than it did back in 1996. Hobbled at the time by the “illbient” tag, Spooky had come to the same conclusions as many of his European contemporaries: that a blend of hip-hop rhythms, dub bass and ambient soundscapes sounded pretty damn inspiring. Songs of a Dead Dreamer is his crowning achievement, and while its construction is relatively simple – loops fed through Spooky’s desk and piped through various effects – the effect is hypnotic and beguiling. While others may have pilfered from dub at a surface level, Spooky was using the Jamaican techniques (mixing board trickery, tape delay etc) to produce alien soundscapes that were a million miles from the comparatively safe sounds of Up, Bustle and Out or Funki Porcini.

djcam

9. DJ Cam Abstract Manifesto (P-Vine, 1996)

Soon after his debut in 1994, Paris’s DJ Cam positioned himself as the European equivalent to DJ Krush and DJ Shadow – a hip-hop enthusiast capable of weaving together abstract, blunted beats with finesse. Within a few years, he’d parlayed his underground kudos for an attempt at more standard rap fare. Abstract Manifesto is one of his lesser-known releases, a Japan-only album that tapped into the same minimal approach as Krush with added jazz flourishes and junglistic detours. ‘No Competition’ remains one of his best compositions to date, and a staple of sets from the era.

majorforcewest

8. Major Force West 93-97 (Mo’ Wax, 1999)

It’s testament to the power of the ideas underpinning trip-hop at the time that this list includes an album spearheaded by a Japanese pop musician who had a hand in the new wave movement. Major Force was the name of Toshio Nakanishi’s hip-hop project, originally conceived in 1988 after a near-decade long infatuation with the music. Comprised of Nakanishi and former Melon bandmates Gota Yashiki and Masayuki Kudo, Major Force released new material as well as an anthology titled The Original Art-Form on Mo’ Wax in the mid-to-late 1990s. The latter is well worth your time, featuring early work and collaborations with Bristol’s DJ Milo, another link in the global thread that supported the music’s most daring leaps. In a 2014 interview, Nakanishi admitted that his fascination with hip-hop stemmed from recognising its links with Burroughs’ cut-ups, stating that “in collage, something happens where you never expected it to.”

93-97 compiles the group’s work during their years living in London, hence the twist to their name. It’s a brilliant and bizarre collection of ideas from a culturally out-of-place trio, who got it because they were so far from the “it” everyone was talking about. In those same years, Nakanishi and Kudo also worked as part of Skylab and you can hear similarities in this collection with the latter’s #1 debut album, especially in how the best of it isn’t the downtempo beats but the drawn-out compositions which have the feel of improvised studio jams. Later on in his interview, Nakanishi points out that London, at the time, felt as psychedelic as the 1960s, with the group seeking to inject some of this spirit into hip-hop, which in England was called trip-hop.

headz2

7. Various Artists Headz 2 (Mo’ Wax, 1996)

Just as the first Headz marked Mo’ Wax’s ascendance, the second compilation crowned its achievements and enshrined its best-known artists in an expansive collection of 53 tracks. While the first volume feels a little dated, Headz 2 has aged remarkably well, in part thanks to its broad representation of what trip-hop could be and where it came from. That means music from the Beastie Boys, UNKLE, Money Mark, The Black Dog, Dillinja, DJ Shadow, Danny Breaks, Tortoise and Urban Tribe among many. Headz 2 is also testament to James Lavelle’s impeccable A&R skills, and his talent for making sense of the various 1990s post-rave threads that informed the music.

leila

6. Leila Like Weather (Rephlex, 1998)

Leila Arab’s debut album stuck out like a sore thumb when it appeared on Rephlex in 1998. Not because it was more extreme than Rephlex’s usual fare, but because it was actually a proper album, with songs, a narrative and little of the label’s usual tongue-in-cheek antics. Arab had pieced together a hazy, underwater daydream of a record with half-heard soul, pop and chiming ice cream truck electronics swirling together in a soup of memory and emotion. Not quite trip-hop and not quite illbient, it certainly wasn’t IDM either, despite an intriguing “post production” credit from a certain Richard D. James. It’s one of the most disarming records of the era, and manages to fulfil the promise of trip-hop without succumbing to its trappings. Like Weather might be the one record on this list that has the most in common with Maxinquaye , and that should tell you something about its quality.

lukevibert

5. Luke Vibert Big Soup (Mo’ Wax, 1997)

Luke Vibert’s first record under his real name, Big Soup summed up the Mo’ Wax catalogue perfectly, even if Vibert was only casually adjacent to the scene. Maybe that helped, as his productions have stood the test of time, sitting somewhere in between the sample-rich collages of DJ Shadow and the tight, precise constructions of DJ Krush and Major Force. The thing that Vibert had and which many of his peers always lacked was a sense of humour, and as track titles like ‘No Turn Unstoned’ might suggest, that helped remove some of the inherent pretentiousness of the scene, breaking down another barrier that walled it off to potential listeners. Vibert’s produced more complicated records since, and he’s produced more successful records too, but Big Soup is a perfect picture of a certain moment in time, painted with a British eccentricity that cuts through the posturing that would later derail the scene.

massive

4. Massive Attack Blue Lines (Island, 1991)

In a 1998 feature for The New York Times , Guy Garcia posited Blue Lines as the blueprint for trip-hop, an argument that holds some weight if you consider that parts of the album were as old as the days of The Wild Bunch, from which the trio emerged. Blue Lines made its mark thanks to a mix of ideas: England’s love affair with sound systems; the comedown from its own summer of love in 1989; and hip-hop’s nascent dominance and rapacious aesthetic. Blue Lines was all of these things and more. Whether or not you consider it trip-hop is at this point in time purely a matter of personal beliefs and largely irrelevant considering its legacy. In 2009, Daddy G told The Observer : “What we were trying to do was create dance music for the head, rather than the feet.” A statement of intent for trip-hop if there ever was one.

djshadow

3. DJ Shadow Endtroducing (Mo’ Wax, 1996)

DJ Shadow’s first album for Mo’ Wax is the kind of debut that places the bar so high in its mastery of a new musical vocabulary that even its creator can never hope to better it, forever living beneath the weight of what he’s accomplished. Endtroducing is the lingua franca of trip-hop, an album crafted by a hip-hop fanatic outside of any direct sphere of influence but his own. Like all of the releases on this list, to define Endtroducing as trip-hop is to limit it, to take away the transformative powers it had to imbue listeners with a new understanding of the potentials of hip-hop as an instrumental music. It’s not just the music that made hip-hop suck in 1996, it was also the critics who couldn’t conceive that albums like Endtroducing were what they claimed to be and nothing more.

portishead

2. Portishead Dummy (Go! Beat, 1994)

Portishead’s 1994 debut was soaked in the same DIY, melting pot approach that typified much of Bristol’s output at the time. From Massive Attack to Smith & Mighty and early Full Cycle releases, the city’s greatest hits in that decade were all about the blending of aesthetics with a brazen irreverence for rules. As a result the music felt both impossible and irresistible. Two decades on, Dummy still sounds as hypnotic and engrossing as it did then, a gritty take on hip-hop, 1960s movie soundtracks and traditional songwriting that laid bare the potentials afforded by sidestepping rigid genre formats.

tricky

1. Tricky Maxinquaye (Island, 1995)

This is the one, really. Tricky named his debut solo album after his mother, Maxine Quaye, and that should already indicate just how personal the record is. He’d sharpened his skills as a member of Massive Attack (indeed some of his rhymes from Blue Lines were recycled here), but his solo material went far beyond his former collaborators’ scope. Tricky was pulling from a darker well, and allowed his struggles, both external and internal, to sit at the album’s epicentre. The result was some of the most tortured and original electronic music cut to wax which gave birth to an era where “weird” became fashionable.

He was assisted by his then-girlfriend Martina Topley-Bird, whose nonchalant purrs offered a foil for Tricky’s hoarse raps. She was the smooth to Tricky’s tab-addled rough, and grounded the project for many listeners, no doubt helping people to lump it in with the similarly located Portishead.

Tricky hated being labeled trip-hop (“This is not a coffee table album. I don’t think you can have dinner parties to it,” he stated in 1996) and has rallied against it ever since, but there can be no argument that, for better or for worse, he left an indelible mark on British music, electronic and otherwise. If covering Public Enemy’s racially charged ‘Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos’ and recasting Chuck D as a mixed-race female from Bristol (singing, instead of rapping) isn’t hitting the genre’s conceit squarely in the face, we’re not sure what is. “If I supposedly invented it, why not call it Tricky-hop?” he said, before releasing Pre-Millenium Tension . He wasn’t wrong.

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The 10 greatest trip-hop bands of all time

22 February 2023, 11:52

Martina Topley-Bird, Tricky and Massive Attack

By Tom Eames

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Trip-hop emerged in the 1990s as a leading force of downtempo electronic music.

Originating largely in Bristol in the early 1990s, trip-hop has been described as a psychedelic mix of hip-hop and electronica, with slower tempos and an atmospheric style. It also uses elements of jazz, soul, funk, reggae, R&B, and other genres, as well as often sampling film soundtracks and other sources.

Trip-hop was first coined by Mixmag , and it soon had commercial success by the second half of the decade.

From its pioneers of the '90s to the artists they influenced, here are the greatest trip-hop artists:

classic trip hop

Morcheeba - Blindfold (Official Video)

Formed in the mid-1990s with singer Skye Edwards and brothers Paul and Ross Godfrey, Morcheeba emerged with sublime influences of rock, folk and downtempo, becoming a leading force in the trip-hop movement, starting with 1996's Who Can You Trust?

They have released 10 studio albums since 1995, with the latest being 2021's Blackest Blue .

Although they have moved on to other genres since their early trip-hop days, they still must be counted as one of the genre's greatest acts.

Sneaker Pimps

classic trip hop

Sneaker Pimps - 6 Underground (Official Music Video)

Formed in Hartlepool in 1994, Sneaker Pimps' debut album, Becoming X was a seminal trip-hop LP in 1996.

Best known for the single '6 Underground', the band takes its name from an article the Beastie Boys published in their Grand Royal magazine about a man they hired to track down classic sneakers.

The band was created by electronic musician Liam Howe and guitarist Chris Corner, and then later recruited singer Kelli Ali (then known as Kelli Dayton).

After a long hiatus, the group returned with Howe and Corner in 2016, and they finally started releasing new music in 2021.

Little Dragon

classic trip hop

Little Dragon - Twice

Swedish band Little Dragon hail from Gothenburg, having formed in 1996.

The band currently consists of singer Yukimi Nagano, Erik Bodin (drums), Fredrik Wallin (bass) and Håkan Wirenstrand (keyboards).

Their first release was the incredible single 'Twice' in 2006, and they brought out their debut album a year later.

Nagano was in her first year in high school when she met seniors Wallin and Bodin. The three of them would meet up after school to jam and play records, and their band name was inspired by the 'Little Dragon' nickname Nagano earned due to the "fuming tantrums" she used to throw while in the studio.

classic trip hop

UNKLE - Rabbit In Your Headlights

UNKLE was founded in 1992 by James Lavelle.

In 1997, Lavelle brought in DJ Shadow to work on his debut album, which was released a year later. The album featured collaborations with the likes of Thom Yorke (Radiohead), Mark Hollis (Talk Talk), Mike D (Beastie Boys), Badly Drawn Boy and Richard Ashcroft (The Verve).

UNKLE as an outfit still exists today, though Lavelle has featured various incarnations of the collective, hiring a wide range of guest musicians and producers along the way.

His most recent studio album release with 2017's The Road: Part 1.

Martina Topley-Bird

classic trip hop

Sandpaper Kisses

English singer and multi-instrumentalist Martina Topley-Bird first found fame when she featured on Tricky's debut album, Maxinquaye in 1995.

She also worked with him on his subsequent albums Nearly God and Pre-Millennium Tension, and then in 2003, she released her debut solo album Quixotic. The album was a critical hit and earned her a Mercury Prize nomination.

She has since worked with the likes of Gorillaz, Diplo and Massive Attack among others, and her track 'Sandpaper Kisses' has been covered Stephen Marley and sampled by The Weeknd.

classic trip hop

Lamb - Gorecki

Electronic music duo Lamb formed in 1996 in Manchester, and consist of producer Andy Barlow and singer-songwriter Lou Rhodes. Rhodes' distinctive vocals gave them a uniquely beautiful sound, and no doubt inspired the likes of The Knife and Goldfrapp.

Their brand of trip-hop is also influenced drum and bass and jazz, and are best known for their singles 'Górecki' and 'Gabriel'.

Despite a hiatus in the 2000s, they have continued to release music, with their most recent being 2019's The Secret of Letting Go .

classic trip hop

DJ Shadow - Midnight In A Perfect World

Speaking of DJ Shadow...

Joshua Davis is an American DJ, songwriter and record producer, known for his famous alter ego. His debut studio album, Endtroducing..... was released in 1996.

DJ Shadow's music often involves manipulating samples, bringing in rare pieces of music and sound clips, from all kinds of genres, particularly on his early albums.

His most recent LP was the double album Our Pathetic Age in 2021.

classic trip hop

Portishead - Glory Box

Portishead - named after the place in Somerset, formed in 1991 in Bristol. Comprising of singer Beth Gibbons, producer Geoff Barrow, and musician Adrian Utley, engineer Dave McDonald is also sometimes credited as the fourth member.

  • The Story of... 'Glory Box' by Portishead

Their 1994 album Dummy brought together hip-hop production with emotive vocals from Gibbons, creating a particularly atmospheric and cinematic sound. It was one of the albums that defined trip-hop as a growing genre.

Portishead themselves have disliked being associated with the genre, and would later move away from the sound on later albums.

classic trip hop

Tricky - 'Black Steel' (Official Video)

British artist Tricky was raised in Bristol, and began his career as an early member of Massive Attack.

He soon began a solo career with his debut album, Maxinquaye , in 1995. It instantly won him huge critical acclaim, and he released four more studio albums before the end of the decade. His most recent album was 2020's Fall to Pieces .

Tricky is considered a pioneer of trip-hop, with his style known for being often dark in tone, and blending cultural influences and genres, such as hip-hop, rock and reggae.

Massive Attack

classic trip hop

Massive Attack - Unfinished Sympathy

Trip-hop pioneers Massive Attack formed in 1988 in Bristol, led by Robert '3D' Del Naja, Adrian 'Tricky' Thaws, Andrew 'Mushroom' Vowles and Grant 'Daddy G' Marshall.

Their debut album Blue Lines was released in 1991, with the single 'Unfinished Sympathy' considered one of the greatest songs of all time, let alone trip-hop.

1998's Mezzanine - containing the classic track 'Teardrop') and 2003's 100th Window were also UK number ones.

They have won various awards of the years, and have sold over 13 million copies worldwide.

Like Portishead, they have never been a massive fan of the 'trip hop' label. Daddy G said in 2006: "We used to hate that terminology [trip-hop] so bad. You know, as far we were concerned, Massive Attack music was unique, so to put it in a box was to pigeonhole it and to say, 'Right, we know where you guys are coming from."

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Trip Hop: The Evolution from The Underground

A brief history of trip hop.

The city of Bristol, United Kingdom has been the epicenter for a multitude of musical movements, including sparking the flame of the trip hop sound. In short, trip hop fuses the organic worlds of funk, soul, and jazz with psychedelic electronica timbres designed to invoke emotions deeper than traditional hip hop.

While artist like sample-based hip hop don DJ Shadow were getting busy stateside in crafting that goes deeper than east coast boom bap or west coast G-funk, the multicultural center of activism Bristol, UK was flaring with a new movement: trip-hop aka downtempo.

Trip-hop swerved from the mainstream appeal of hip hop where graffiti, breakdance, and hip hop were the cultural norm. Instead, style of music with big appeal in the UK underground at the time, namely breakbeat, helped this genre unfurl. Breakbeat is simple “broken beats”, which originate from jazz and funk and evolved into trip-hop, jungle, drum n bass, funky breaks, etc.

What’s the Difference between Downtempo and Trip Hop?

Trip Hop is of Bristol, UK origin from the late 80s/early 90s and embodies breakbeat influence, while keeping the psychedelic nature in the lyrics and instrumentation. “Downtempo” is of Ibiza, Spain origin which retains an ambient nature dedicated to chill-out spaces in the Ibiza clubs.

There’s a difference in the feel of the two sibling-genres, as well, despite their differences. Both include ambient and psychedelic textures but are separate rhythmically.

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Classic Examples of Trip Hop

Probably one of the most prominent trip hop groups out of Bristol, UK who started in 1991. Most known for their hit track "Glory Box", this trio paved the way for an entire modern sound.

Among the first North American voices in trip hop where DJ Shadow out of the Bay Area brought together sample-based hip hop with psychedelic undertones. Tracks like "Midnight in a Perfect World" off of his 1996 album Endtroducing.... remains an identifiable track within his catalogue

Massive Attack

The originators of the trip-hop movement, the Massive Attack duo out of the Bristol, UK area have shaped the culture with their heavy instrumentals and epic melodies. Tracks like "Teardrop" off of their 1998 album Mezzanine remains their most streamed track on Spotify.

While the above acts covered the golden years of trip hop in the early and mid nineties, American producer RJD2 is a voice from the early 2000s. His most recognizable tune is "Ghostwriter" off of his 2002 album Deadringer .

Where Is Trip Hop Going?

It's dwindling...Or is it?

Trip-hop has now been absorbed by other styles since its inception. Google Trends shows the biggest activity from the beginning of its own history. Naturally, this is because trip-hop was popular before search engine's existence.

classic trip hop

But now, the musical landscape has grown into a colorful vine of sub-genres and spin-offs. While the search trends for trip-hop go down, it isn't to say that it is dying. It is rather changing. New modes of trip-hop style from psy-dub, to lo-fi hip hop, to glitch space bass are the branches of the trip-hop tree that are now flowing out.

Modern Examples of Triphop + Spin-Offs

The trip hop influence has unwound into various sub-sects of electronic music showing us the results of its evolution through time. Below are examples of up and coming artists who all embody the trip hop sound

Seppa - Bass Infused Trip-Hop

This track comes from a producer who lives in the very region trip-hop was born. The city of Bristol, UK is known for its eclectic nightlife and celebrates innovation in music. Kind of like a silicon valley for huge tunes. Producer Seppa brings a searing edge with massive sound designs that often come with trip hop style beats, drum n bass, or half-time grooves.

Read more about Seppa in our our interview with him .

il:lo - Trip-Hop With World Sounds

This French duo bring lots of world music sounds and synths to their blend of trip hop inspired tunes. Expect vast soundscapes and beautiful vocal pads from releases like their 2019 Sloh.

Discover more about il:lo in their mini mix and interview on Stereofox .

Nym - Cinematic Downtempo

Durham, NC producer Nym is a storyteller. He combines many aspects, from film samples, to worldly percussion and instruments, to vocals and mixes them into an ethereal experience that certainly puts the "trip" in "trip hop". Check out the title-track to his 2019 album:

Somatoast - Psy-dub & Trip-Hop

Psychedelic and weird is what Texan producer is all about. His tunes can't really be classified, but he certainly includes a flavor of dub, hip hop, and wonky sounds. Check out his track "Broken Bits" off of his 2019 release Live Dreaming:

Trip Hop Playlists

If you're new to trip hop, returning to it, or a big fan of it, then here are some solid windows into the genre. Spotify has a robust selection of trip hop classics in their Trip Hop playlist.

If you're looking to expand upon trip-hop and swim around in the world of ambient music, which is not exclusively limited to trip hop, check out our regularly-updated, curated Spotify playlist Ambient Space :

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Capturing the zeitgeist with unsettling, genre- and gender-blurring visions, ‘Maxinquaye’ introduced Tricky as a unique voice for a generation.

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In 1994, Bristol’s music scene went from being a cult concern to big news, as Massive Attack consolidated their reputation with sophomore album Protection , and Portishead joined the party with Dummy . If there was any doubt left as to the city’s talent, in 1995 it was banished for good.

Coming from a mixed-race family, Massive Attack rapper and Portishead collaborator Tricky (aka Adrian Thaws, and formerly Tricky Kid) had been steeped in Bristol’s sound-system culture since birth and had already signaled his intentions with the (initially independently-released) single “Aftermath” and the Indian-vibed Howie B production “Ponderosa,” before releasing his equally era-defining debut solo album, Maxinquaye .

Listen to Maxinquaye on Apple Music and Spotify .

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Ably abetted by seasoned producer Mark Saunders (who brought something of his work with The Cure to proceedings), Tricky’s late-night-toned, depressive, beautiful-ugly debut album was a No.3 UK hit, a critical touchstone in broken and bombed Britain, and the drug-damaged epitome of both the “trip” and the “hop” in trip-hop. This is despite much of the record being a deliberate affront to American hip-hop conventions, starting with the continued references to sexual dysfunction.

A Bowie for the 90s

Named poignantly for his late mother, and featuring references both to Rastafarianism and to being a “weeping wino,” Maxinquaye was also filled with nods to Tricky’s contemporaries, both in Bristol and further afield. Opener “Overcome” has the album’s heavily featured guest singer Martina Topley-Bird revisit his key contribution to Protection , “Karmacoma,” and the excellent “Hell Is Round The Corner” looks to Isaac Hayes ’ “Ike’s Rap II” (as sampled by Portishead on the moody “Glory Box”), flipping it into a crackling, paranoid nightmare.

Topley-Bird was most striking on the cover of Public Enemy ’s anti-draft “Black Steel In The Hour Of Chaos,” adding an unexpected gender-political dimension to the track (as she does on many of Maxinquaye ’s others written by Thaws). The resultant “Black Steel” was also switched from its relatively low-key origin into heavy metal, with the help of drummer FTV. The emphasis on gender obfuscation was underlined by Tricky and Topley-Bird’s androgynous photo shoots and videos: Thaws said that he was acting as a conduit for his late poet mother, but he also (consciously or not) provided a Bowie -esque figure for the 90s.

Tricky - Black Steel

Capturing the zeitgeist

Released on February 20, 1995, Maxinquaye was so stuffed with unsettling, greased-lens goodies that the whole first half of the album came out as singles. These showed multiple facets of Tricky’s personality, reflecting the eclecticism of the times, with the Smashing Pumpkins -sampling “Pumpkin” having a torch song feel similar to that of Portishead (courtesy of an early appearance from Alison Goldfrapp). “You Don’t” took a more reggae-influenced tone (with vocals from Icelandic singer Ragga) and the atmosphere of the Mark Stewart-featuring “Aftermath” was summed up by one of the single’s remix titles: hip-hop blues.

The single remixes took things even further, as the tough funk of “Brand New You’re Retro” was twisted into drum’n’bass in the hands of Alex Reece (as featured on the deluxe version of Maxinquaye ), while Thaws employed American horrorcore rappers Gravediggaz to add to the gloom on the  The Hell EP .

While Tricky has remained interesting since his debut, he has never captured the zeitgeist so dazzlingly, nor has as much collective care been taken on his overall concept and execution as is was on Maxinquaye , a true 90s classic.

Maxinquaye can be bought here .

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Fahrenheit Magazine

The four best trip-hop bands of all time

Adrian Nicholas Matthews Thaws is better known as Tricky. Photo: The Guardian

Trip-hop is a musical genre which emerged in the 1990s as a combination of other genres, mainly from hip hop , the dub, the reggae , jazz and soul.

Following the fact that in the 80s hip-hop, coming from the United States, had a resounding success in consolidating itself as a genre and became popular thanks to its lyrics in which it portrayed life in the American suburbs, trip-hop did not found any barrier and crossed the bounds geographic, landing in the old continent, specifically, in the country where a new musical current was born: England, being the city of Bristol the one that would adopt it without thinking.

It was in this English city where urban artists such as DJs, rappers, graffiti artists and even breakdancers met in places or bars type underground to show their combinations and artistic works to the attendees. 

Among these urban artists there was a group in particular, The Wild Bunch, which could be said to be the first to give rise to the so-called trip hop. It was Massive Attack that, in the year 1991, when releasing their debut album  Blue Line s that he would begin to make history, since he released the first album considered trip-hop.

Because of this, we decided to briefly talk about four of the best trip-hop bands of all time.

Massive Attack

Massive Attack, pioneering trip-hop band, formed in 1988 in Bristol , led by Robert '3D' Del Naja, Adrian 'Tricky' Thaws, Andrew 'Mushroom' Vowles and Grant 'Daddy G' Marshall.

His debut album Blue lines was released in 1991, with the single Unfinished Sympathy and, considered one of the best songs of all time, not to mention trip-hop.

Mezzanine from 1998, containing the classic song teardrop y 100thWindow , from 2003, were also number one in the UK. This group has won several awards over the years and has sold more than 13 million copies worldwide.

Like Portishead, they've never been big fans of their music being labeled trip-hop.

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British artist Tricky grew up in Bristol and began his career as one of the early members of Massive Attack.

He soon launched a solo career with his debut album, maxinquay e, in 1995. In a very short time this became a true success and was critically acclaimed, for which he released four more studio albums before the end of the decade. His most recent album was 2020's Fall to Pieces.

Tricky is considered a pioneer of trip-hop, with his well-known style often featuring a very dark tone and mixing cultural influences and genres, such as hip-hop, rock and reggae.

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This group named after the place in Somerset, was formed in 1991 in Bristol, England. Band made up of singer Beth Gibbons, producer Geoff Barrow and musician Adrian Utley, as well as sound engineer Dave McDonald, who is also sometimes credited as the fourth member.

His 1994 album, Dummy, featured Gibbons' soulful vocals, creating a particularly atmospheric and cinematic sound. It was one of the albums that defined trip-hop as a growing genre.

It should be noted that Portishead themselves did not like being associated with the genre, so they moved away from that sound on subsequent albums.

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UNKLE was founded in 1992 by James Lavelle. In 1997 the latter hired DJ Shadow to work on his debut album, which was released a year later. 

The album featured collaborations from the likes of Thom Yorke (Radiohead), Mark Hollis (Talk Talk), Mike D (Beastie Boys), Badly Drawn Boy and Richard Ashcroft (The Verve).

UNKLE still exists as a group, though Lavelle has put on various incarnations of the collective, hiring a wide range of guest musicians and producers along the way.

His most recent studio album release with The Road: Part 1 by 2017.

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Freddie Mercury playing with Queen. Photo: The Art Newspaper

‘Music dug up from under the earth’: how trip-hop never stopped

Fused from jungle, rave and soul, trip-hop filled the coffee tables of the 90s, and is now inspiring Billie Eilish’s generation. So why is the term so despised by many?

N obody really wanted to be trip-hop. The stoner beats of Nightmares on Wax’s 1995 Smokers Delight album were era defining, but it carried the prominent legend: “THIS IS NOT TRIP HOP”. James Lavelle’s Mo’ Wax label flirted with the term after it was coined by Mixmag in 1994, but quickly switched to displaying it ostentatiously crossed out on their sleeves. Ninja Tune did print the phrase “triphoptimism” on a king size rolling paper packet in 1996, but only as a joke about escaping categories.

“I always disliked the term,” says Lou Rhodes of Lamb, “and I would always make a point in interviews of challenging its use in regard to Lamb.” Mark Rae of Rae & Christian similarly says: “I would give a score of 9/10 on the lazy journalist scale to anyone who placed us in the trip-hop camp.” And Geoff Barrow’s ferocious hatred of the term – let alone its application to Portishead – has become the stuff of social media legend.

The distaste is understandable. The template of crawling beats, cinematic strings and dubby basslines, usually with a female vocalist and weed-smoking signifiers, became one of the most ubiquitous sounds of the late 90s. The phrase itself stretched to become a catch-all for any and all downtempo music, from wafty supermarket-checkout budget CD “chillout” to highly crafted UK soul. It very quickly became the object of snobbery, called “coffee table music” by those who found the idea music could be comforting or domesticated an anathema.

Jhelisa Anderson

But whatever you call it, the specifically 90s downtempo vibe abides. 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. 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. 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.

And perhaps even more significantly, younger musicians are channelling the sound. Some of the most high-profile acts in the world – Billie Eilish, Lana Del Rey, Lorde – are unabashed in these 90s references. Alicia Keys’ new single, Best of Me, couldn’t be more trip-hop if it was made in a smoky Bristol basement in 1995. 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. 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. 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”. 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. “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. “Then of course you start thinking: am I that old?”

Liam Howe has passed on the trip-hop gene to FKA twigs, Lana Del Rey and Adele.

To understand the durability of these sounds, it’s worth looking at some of the objections to the way they were labelled. Evelyn grew up with reggae soundsystem culture and was a hip-hop and electro fanatic, who breakdanced competitively as a teen. He regarded his early rave tunes as hip-hop collage in the tradition of instrumentals by Mantronix, Marley Marl, DJ Red Alert and co. “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. The drum’n’bass thing, the jungle thing, that was all born out of the same set of influences. I do think about the 90s a lot. It was exciting; it felt like a new sound was coming out of the UK every three days.”

Rhodes, too, took inspiration in the breakbeat collage of rave. “Our background was nights at the Haçienda and Manchester pirate stations,” she says, remembering Peter Bouncer’s vocal over Shut Up and Dance’s breakbeats on the 1992 rave track Love Is All We Need. “My mum was a folk singer, and I felt the pull to write songs that danced around those fucked-up beats. That was the impetus for Lamb.” The closeness to techno, rave and electronica was embodied in labels such as Warp, Ninja Tune and Mo’ Wax, where Squarepusher, Autechre, Roni Size and Carl Craig would sit alongside – or remix – downtempo acts. It’s a lineage explored in the 2020 book Bedroom Beats & B-Sides by Laurent Fintoni , which also explores how trip-hop influenced the likes of Flying Lotus (an avowed Portishead fan), and thus the experimental “beat scene” and 21st century hip-hop more broadly.

Louise Rhodes and Andrew Barlow of Lamb in 2001.

The other vital precursor was the UK’s unique soul lineage. “Sade, Cymande, Soul II Soul,” remembers Evelyn, “that was the foundation of our whole thing too. Even when we were rocking [reggae] soundsystems, you’d always have that half-hour or so when they’d play street soul or rare grooves. That all influenced all of us; I’m sure someone like [Massive Attack’s] Daddy G would say the same thing.” Through the late 80s and early 90s, acts such as Smith & Mighty, the Sindecut, Young Disciples and, of course, Soul II Soul and Massive Attack made a very distinctly British laid-back breakbeat sound ubiquitous from charts to underground clubs. The acid jazz movement overlapped with this, too: it’s the scene Mo’ Wax emerged from, and Liam Howe of Sneaker Pimps recalls, around 1993, “taking our white labels around the record shops of Soho, where you might bump into [acid jazz movers] Kevin Beadle, Gilles Peterson, James Lavelle and Patrick Forge … we were making peculiar, laid-back dance stuff that at the time we referred to just as ‘head music’.”

Jhelisa Anderson is one of the more obvious connections to the soul/jazz world, but also one of the few musicians who fondly embraces “trip-hop” as a term. Mississippian by birth, she relished British eccentricity and independence, as compared with a US industry that “would’ve had me trying to copy Janet Jackson”. She found, in Portishead , Tricky and Topley-Bird, “a version of modern blues, a depth and darkness” that drew a line from 60s and 70s soul, but also had a connection to “something old and pagan that I heard in Thom Yorke and shoegaze, a different kind of ancient expression of feeling blue, of being dark”.

That conception of a kind of specifically British blues isn’t so far fetched. Tara Mills wasn’t born when Massive Attack’s Unfinished Sympathy came out, but cites it as one of her favourite songs: “I’ve cried to that song, I’ve driven home too fast, upset, in the middle of the night, to that song.” And she found precisely the right darkness in Carns Hill’s drill beats to “make you feel something in that same way”. And the moodiness and melancholy have permeated through to a new generation in many other ways. Rhodes hears “a kind of bloodline running through James Blake and the xx” to Billie Eilish and co. Her son Reuben, who releases downtempo beats as Joseph Efi, connects the “Bristol sound” of Portishead and Massive Attack to the ineffable sadness of Burial. “There’s something about the melancholia of those Bristol tunes,” he says, “that could’ve only come from the depths of a small British city. Music dug up from under the earth or heard in the pouring rain on your walk home at night.”

Martina Topley-Bird

This mood has gradually spread around the world. As well as through electronic and hip-hop artists such as Flying Lotus, and ubiquity of tracks such as Rob Dougan’s Mo’ Wax hit Clubbed to Death in Hollywood soundtracks, the British moodiness found its way into big pop exports. Mark Rae notes that “our production and writing of the track The Hush by Texas-influenced Dido, and the domino effect is created when that language is taken to the mainstream successfully”. It’s not a big leap to hear trip-hop echoes in Mark Ronson’s work with Amy Winehouse and Adele – and there are direct connections, too: Howe, for example, has passed on the trip-hop gene as a writer and producer for the likes of FKA twigs, Lana Del Rey and, indeed, Adele.

It seems like the further we get from its origins, the less toxic the phrase seems. Even Topley-Bird, who never accepted it at the time “because I thought we felt pretty unique”, says “in America people talk about trip-hop without any sense of shame or embarrassment, which is endearing … And a few friends are telling me that artists like Billie Eilish sound like me – which can’t be a bad thing. I came back with new music at the right time!”

Nightmares on Wax’s album Shout Out! To Freedom … is out now on Warp. Mark Rae’s novel and soundtrack The Caterpillar Club is out now on Mark’s Music. Sneaker Pimps’ album Squaring the Circle is out now on Unfall. Jhelisa’s album 7 Keys V.2 is out now on Dorado. Martina Topley-Bird’s self-released album Forever I Wait is out now. Tara Mills’ album False Hope is out now on CL Management. Joseph Efi’s EP Candour is out now on Lowlife.

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  • Martina Topley-Bird
  • Massive Attack
  • Drum'n'bass

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Beach Hop Festival 2024: Coromandel District prepares for influx of classic cars

Malisha Kumar

Malisha Kumar

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The 2024 Repco Beach Hop Festival kicks off in less than a month in the Coromandel District. Photo / Parkside Media

Less than four weeks remain until a celebration of classic cars and rock-n-roll of the 1950s and sixties.

The Repco Beach Hop Festival comes back to the Coromandel , from March 20-24.

Exciting things are planned with more than 1000 vehicles participating in the four-day event.

Festival organiser Noddy Watts said the upcoming festival also coincided with a huge moment in American motoring history.

“This year is special because it’s the 60th anniversary of the Ford Mustang which first came about in 1964.

More than 1000 cars have entered into the festival. Photo / Parkside Media

“It’s a big and iconic American muscle car, so we’re going to do additional extra features which we’re really excited about.”

Watts said the festival celebrated a transitional era.

“Celebrations of the 50s and 60s are an important part of our culture from what happened in the two decades following World War Two.

“Societies and countries did a lot of rebuilding and lots of things changed - the design of cars, more powerful V8 engines, music changed, there was a rock-n-roll revolution.

“People’s freedoms also changed during the time of those 20 years, and that’s what we celebrate.”

After overcoming road closures, natural disasters, and the effects of the pandemic, Watts was thrilled to be celebrating 24 years.

He said they were expecting a bigger spectator turnout this year as things look brighter for New Zealand.

“Last year with the weather events of Cyclone Gabrielle people were really apprehensive to travel because State Highway 25A was closed. The only road to Whangamata was through Waihī.

“We’ve had four really tough years but we never cancelled an event and just had to postpone two.

The Beach Hop festival is a celebration of the 1950's and 1960's era. Photo / Parkside Media

“This year, touch wood, everything is going well, and with the Hikuwai Bailey Bridge open, we’re expecting heaps more people.”

The festival from March 20 to 24 has heaps planned for the district, including a new edition last year coming on board for round two this year.

The Lowrider Slamfest is pushing close to 100 cars on display this year with a bigger area to go in, which was a jump from 70 cars last year.

The power cruise on March 21 followed the same protocol as the changes made last year when SH25A was closed.

Participants were sent to visit and purchase something in surrounding Coromandel towns to help the economy, and this year participants will go in the draw to win $5000 if they shop outside of a town in Whangamata.

A classic Mustang show, over 100 retro caravans, vintage markets, and five or six car shows were also planned.

Watts said the Beachhop Festival was an initiative to help give back to local emergency services.

“All the proceeds raised from the event go back into the community and it’s in our constitution that proceeds raised go to local emergency services like Surf Lifesaving NZ, Coastguard, Search and Rescue, St John and others.

“We want to keep our community safe because if we had a dangerous beach or people get lost, nobody will come to the Coromandel and that’s why for the past 24 years we’ve been giving our money to these organisations.”

On March 20, Repco has a new event to kick off the festival called ‘Hair’, which Watts said was a 1960′s movie and staged musical that was fairly controversial at the time.

The Hair event at the Repco garage in Whangamata would be a celebration of all things hair: from beards and moustaches to mullets and rock-n-roll hairstyles with cash prizes for the best hairdos and beard styles.

There are heaps of prizes to win at the festival itself and buying a $5 festival programme could get people in the draw to win a 1966 Ford Mustang, a brand new Harley Davidson motorbike, or a cash prize of $10,000.

Watts said it was a chance for people from anywhere to come and take a breath and have some fun at the festival.

“It’s free for the public, Whangamata is so beautiful to go back to that rock-n-roll era, classic cars at the beach, surfers and beach boys, it all gels together.

“Come along, have fun, and be safe. Look after each other and re-live what it was like in those days when life was great and things were simple.”

The Repco Beach Hop Festival 2024 kicks off in Waihī first from March 20-24.

For the festival time, dates, and schedule, visit the B each Hop website.

Malisha Kumar is a multimedia journalist based in Hamilton. She joined the Waikato Herald in 2023 after working for Radio 1XX in Whakatāne.

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Immersive trip down Hip Hop memory lane examines the music genre's influence on American Culture

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HOLLYWOOD, Calif. -- Hip Hop music has cemented itself in American culture. The immersive exhibition Hip Hop Til Infinity takes a retrospective look at the music genre's influence, featuring the likes of Snoop Dogg, Tupac Shakur, and Nipsey Hustle.

"Hip Hop has become a driving force to be reckoned with," said legendary graffiti artist Edwin Sacasa, who goes by Shirt King Phade. "Seeing the seeds that were planted in the 70s and 80s, it's amazing to see the growth."

"This is all stuff that you're not going to see on the internet," said Mark Bijasa, a curator and designer with the exhibition's producers Mass Appeal. "These are rare artifacts and collectibles. It's an experience that all Hip Hop fans should have a chance to see."

For more information, go to: https://hiphoptilinfinityla.com/

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Our 20 Best Moscow Tours of 2022

Join us on an unforgettable tour to Moscow, the capital of Russia. Imagine visiting Red Square, St. Basil’s the Kremlin and more. Moscow is one of Europe’s most vibrant cities and one of Russia’s most historical. All of our tours to Moscow are fully customizable and can be adjusted to fit any budget. Our most popular tours are listed below. Please click on the tour details to learn more or contact us for more information about our Moscow tours using the form at the side of the page. You can also schedule a call with one of our Russian travel specialists to learn more.

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This is our most popular Moscow tour that includes all the most prominent sights. You will become acquainted with ancient Russia in the Kremlin, admire Russian art in the Tretyakov Gallery, listen to street musicians as you stroll along the Old Arbat street, and learn about Soviet times on the Moscow Metro tour.

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A Week in Moscow

This tour is a perfect choice for those who wish to get to know Moscow in depth. One of the highlights of this package is the KGB history tour which gives an interesting perspective on the Cold War. You will also have time for exploring the city on your own or doing extra sightseeing.

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Weekend in Moscow

This tour is a great way to get acquainted with the capital of Russia if you are short of time. You will see all the main attractions of the city, the most important of which is the Kremlin - the heart of Russia. The tour starts on Friday and can be combined with a business trip.

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Russia's capital has so much to offer, from the Kremlin and the Metro to the Old Arbat street and the Tretyakov Gallery. Besides these sites, you will also visit a fascinating country estate which today is quite off the beaten path, Gorky Estate, where the Soviet leader Lenin spent the last months of his life.

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The history of Kolomenskoye stretches back for centuries. In 1380, Dmitri Donskoi’s army passed through Kolomenskoye on their way to the Kulikovo battlefield, and it was...

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The Kremlin is truly a fascinating structure, at the same time it is an ancient tower, the city’s former military fortification, a palace, an armory, the sovereign treasury...

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You will be told of the street’s interesting history and view the street’s artisan culture. You will also have the opportunity to view and purchase souvenirs from the...

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Considered by some to be the Russian Vatican, Sergiev Posad is the temporary residence of the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church. The Trinity St. Sergius Monastery (Lavra)...

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The Kuskovo Estate often called the Moscow Versailles due to its perfectly preserved French park, is an example of an 18th century, luxurious Moscow summer residence. Its history...

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The Tsaritsyno Estate is located in the southern part of Moscow. The estate was constructed for Catherine the Great by the Russian architects Bazhenov and Kazakov in a romantic...

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The Moscow Metro is one of the largest and most grandly built metro systems in the world. It was meant to be a showcase of the Soviet Union’s achievements for both the Russians...

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Vodka is an important component of Russian life, an element of national identity and everyday culture. We invite you to visit the Vodka Museum and feel the atmosphere of long-gone...

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Mikhail Bulgakov Apartment Museum

This apartment museum located close to Patriarch Ponds became the prototype of the "bad apartment" described in the novel "The Master and Margarita." Currently the museum's...

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Kremlin, Red Sq., Cathedrals & Diamond Fund Tour

Portrait of Leo Tolstoy by Ilya Repin (1887)

The State Museum of Lev Tolstoy Tour

Take this opportunity to learn more about the Russian writer Lev Tolstoy. During the visit to the museum you will see part of a vast collection of exhibits connected to Tolstoy...

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Novodevichy Convent Tour with transport

Tour of the Novodevichy Monastery. Founded in 1524 by Grand Prince VasiliIoanovich, the original convent was enclosed by fortified walls and contained 12 towers. The structure...

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City Tour with Visit to St. Basils & Red Sq. with transport

Panoramic City Tour. This Moscow tour is a great start to your trip and the best way to get acquainted with many of the city’s major highlights. Our professional guide will...

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City Tour of Moscow

Head to the heart of Moscow with a professional guide on a 4-hour private walk through the city center. See Tverskaya and Old Arbat streets, Theatre Square with the world-famous...

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This is a very interesting and insightful tour. You will visit places connected with Stalin’s terror - a time of great repression and fear. You will be shown monuments to...

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The tour begins with a drive or walk down Tverskaya Street – a Soviet masterpiece. In the years of Soviet power, Tverskaya began to undergo a transformation: it was widened...

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This world-famous gallery contains masterpieces of Russian art beginning in the 10th century up until today. You will view exquisite Russian icons and paintings from the 18th and...

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This tour offers a detailed look into the history and present-day life of the Jewish community of Moscow. On the tour, you will visit sites connected with the cultural and religious...

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Lena, our guide in Moscow was excellent. She was very knowledgable and could answer any question we had for her. We liked that she could pick up on our interests and take us places we might not have thought of to go. When we realized that one of the places we had chosen to see would probably not be that interesting to us, she was able to arrange entry to the Diamond Fund and the Armoury for us. Riding the Metro with Lena was a real adventure and a lot of fun. In Saint Petersburg we found Anna well versed in the history of the Tsars and in the Hermitage collection. Arkady in Veliky Novgorod was a very good guide and answered all of our questions with ease. Novgorod was perhaps a long way to go for a day trip, but we did enjoy it. Vasily was a great driver to have and kept us safe with good humour and skill. We enjoyed ourselves so much, my daughter says she is already planning to return. We would both have no hesistation to recommend ExpresstoRussia to anyone we know.

Just wanted to let you know that My grandson Bruno and I couldn´t have been more pleased with our week in Moscow (6/15 - 6/21). We were absolutely enchanted with the whole experience, including getting lost a couple of times in the Metro during our free time. Although both our guides (both Eleanas) were excellent, I would particularly commend the first one (she took us to the Tatiakov, the KGB tour, and to that beautiful cemetery where so many great Russian artists, authors, composers, musicians, militarists, and politicians are buried). Her knowledge is encyclopedic; and her understanding of today´s Russia as a product of its past was, for us, truly enlightening. I will be taking another tour in Russia, with my wife, within the next two or three years. I will be in touch with you when the time comes. Meanwhile, I will refer you to other potential visitors to Russia as I meet them.

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Novodevichy Convent, Moscow

Moscow, a City Like No Other

Moscow is Russia’s largest city with a population of between 12 and 13 million. It is also Europe’s largest city and when you visit Moscow, you can feel it. The layout and architecture of the city is eclectic, ranging from crooked, ancient streets and alleyways to wide, bustling boulevards, from medieval churches to Stalin skyscrapers and to modern, glass buildings towering over everything and of course in the center of it all is the Kremlin and the magnificent Red Square. Moscow is also home to a fantastic, efficient and very beautiful metro system – each station having its own special design. In fact, Express to Russia’s Moscow metro tours and excursions are some of our most popular attractions that we offer. On our Moscow tours, you will see this and more.

Moscow Kremlin in the times of Ivan III

Moscow Tours centering on Russian History

Moscow has a long and interesting history and has been the capital of Russia in many of its different iterations – capital of the Grand Duchy of Moscow , the Russian Empire and of course the Soviet Union (who could ever forget the Soviet Union?). Moscow, was founded in the 12th century by Prince Yuri Dolgaruki (Yuri of the long arms – he really did have long arms!). From that time on, it was home to the Russian Tsars until Peter the Great moved the capital to St. Petersburg in 1703. The city has survived invasions and sieges from the Mongols, the Tartars, the Poles, Lithuanians and Napoleon but has always persevered. Our Moscow tours will enlighten you on this great history and give you insights into Muscovites and their unique culture. Our Moscow tours show you what the city is like today but also brings to life the past. Moscow never seems to sleep and is bursting with energy. A Moscow tour with Express to Russia is truly the best way of getting to know Russia’s largest and most vibrant city.

Frequently Asked Questions From Our Travelers

What is the best time to visit moscow.

Any time of year is fine depending on what you plan to do. Summertime is pleasantly warm, ideal for exploring the city and its vibrant atmosphere, but Moscow will be much busier and accommodation is more expensive. Winter can be quite cold but beautiful nonetheless, and this is unproblematic if you intend to spend most of your trip in museums and galleries. There are also various festivals and events organised throughout the year. For more information about the best time to visit, read our guide

How many days are enough in Moscow?

If you plan your itinerary strategically and aren’t averse to a packed schedule, you can cover Moscow’s main sights over a long weekend. Most popular attractions are in the city centre, and the Moscow Metro allows you to cover much ground in a small amount of time. Ensure that your accommodation is fairly central and book tickets in advance, so that you can make the most of your days. For an informative and well-organised day out, check out our Moscow day tours with options to suit all interests.

Do they speak English in Moscow?

As Russia’s capital city, tourists are well accommodated in Moscow. There should be English-speaking staff in restaurants, bars, hotels, shops and attractions in tourist hotspots, and there are also English-speaking tourist police. Transport services have English translations on their maps and English announcements via intercom; alternatively, order taxis from the Yandex Taxi app (Russian Uber), though it’s unlikely that your taxi driver will speak English. If you get stuck and cannot communicate, it’s fine to use Google Translate.

Is it safe to travel to Moscow?

It is no less safe to travel to Moscow than to any European city if you exercise common sense and look after your belongings. As with every city some regions can be more unsavoury than others, but no tourist attractions are located there. The traffic in Moscow is notorious, so exercise caution when crossing roads. Do not take unlicensed taxis; book in advance or take public transport, which is widespread and perfectly safe. If you encounter any problems, look for the special tourist police who can help you. For more information, read our guide about staying safe in Russia .

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City Sightseeing Moscow Hop-On Hop-Off Bus Tour with Optional Cruise

classic trip hop

  • Hop-on or hop-off at any of Moscow’s main highlights
  • Views of Moscow from an open-top, double-decker bus
  • Learn about the city with recorded commentary
  • Visit Red Square, Alexander Gardens, and more
  • Bus pass inclusions: 48 or 72 hour bus pass + walking tour
  • Boat pass inclusions: 60 minute boat trip + walking tour
  • Bus & Boat pass inclusions: 48 hour bus pass + 60 minute boat trip + walking tour
  • Vouchers valid for 12 months
  • Hotel pickup and drop-off
  • Food and drinks, unless specified
  • Location Name: The route begins at Red Square but you can board at any stop
  • Wheelchair accessible
  • Stroller accessible
  • Near public transportation
  • Confirmation will be received at time of booking
  • Red Route runs from 10:00am - 6:00pm, every 25 minutes. Duration - 60 minutes. First stop - Bolotnaya Square.
  • Most travelers can participate
  • Green Route runs from 10:00am - 6:00pm, every 60 minutes. Duration - 120 minutes. First stop - Bolotnaya Square.
  • Orange Route (currently suspended) runs from 10:30am - 6:30pm, every 30 minutes. Duration - 140 minutes. First stop - Museum of Cosmonautics
  • Walking tour runs daily at 10:45am. Duration - 2 hours 30 minutes. Meeting point - Next to monument of Saints Cyril and Methodius.
  • Boat tour operates 5th May - 20th October, from 11:30am - 6:30pm. Duration - 60 minutes. Meeting point - Zaryadye Park Pier.
  • Mobile and paper vouchers are accepted for this tour.
  • Vouchers can be redeemed at any of the stops along the routes.
  • Vouchers are valid for 12 months
  • For a full refund, cancel at least 24 hours in advance of the start date of the experience.

classic trip hop

  • DebbJ 0 contributions 4.0 of 5 bubbles Great way to get oriented to Moscow We started our Moscow experience with the hop on hop off. It was a great way to get orientated to the city. The additional optional tours were also good, we did the Metro tour which I highly recommend, we also paid for the Kremlin tour. The hop on hop off has three different lines all included. Only fault was the bus was sometimes full and you had to wait for the next one which was about 15 minutes (in the cold). Read more Written January 6, 2020
  • UmaDelhi 0 contributions 5.0 of 5 bubbles 2 days are required Very very good audio guides- the voice quality was also good and also the anecdotes of history were brilliant. Russia is truly beautiful Read more Written September 1, 2019
  • BeverleyT 0 contributions 1.0 of 5 bubbles Boat trip - TERRIBLE We got on the bus, but couldn’t buy a 1 day ticket. They suggested we do the 1 hour boat trip and said they would drop us to the dock. 1) they dropped us in the wrong place 2) they were lost because of the marathon Then the boat, after we finally found it: 1) stinking fumes, actually gagging 2) no commentary, in fact, no interaction unless you begged 3) offered us 2 for 1 icecreams as they had melted and refrozen as the fridge gets turned off at night Honestly, we enjoyed the afternoon in the boat but spent all of it laughing at just how awful it was!!! The worst thing in Moscow! Read more Written August 18, 2019
  • niruDurbs 0 contributions 3.0 of 5 bubbles Not the best value for the price The ticket is quite expensive and covers three different routes in a 24 hour period. The red route is quite exciting and takes about an hour. The bus comes every 10 to 15 minutes. However the other two routes take about two hours each and buses come every 30 to 40 minute period. If the bus is full then you have to wait at the stop for the next bus. So personally I feel that not much can be seen this way. I definitely was not impressed. However it must be noted that one can learn a lot about the history of Moscow Read more Written July 3, 2019
  • IrishCueTravel 0 contributions 1.0 of 5 bubbles SLO Motion Not all their fault , but if you plan on trying this Attraction be patient! Traffic is a big problem first and foremost. But to add additional unnecessary delays; the bus stops at each site for 15 minutes at a time or More ! I gave up half way through ( 45 minutes) ; and walked back to the starting point in 10 minutes! Read more Written June 4, 2019
  • michael g 0 contributions 1.0 of 5 bubbles Worst hop on/hop off EVER Waited for 40 minutes in the cold rain for a bus that never came... unacceptable. Traffic is so bad that when on a bus the previos day it was barely moving. My advice-get a subway pass and a good travel guide book and do sightseeing on your own! Read more Written October 24, 2018
  • Rebecca J 0 contributions 3.0 of 5 bubbles Boat element was excellent We purchased a ticket online for the boat and bus for 2 days. The boat element was wonderful, we saw some amazing parts of Moscow along the river side. The bus element was very disappointing as it only started at 10am and was finished by 6:30pm. It was extremely warm when we were there and it would have been great to do the tour in the cool of the day. There was also no air conditioning in the down stairs part of the bus. They also turned away passengers at one of the stops as the bus was full and there was not another bus for 40 minutes. Read more Written September 26, 2018
  • Monismith2014 0 contributions 4.0 of 5 bubbles it was very enjoyable it was very interesting seeing things we saw walking around from the bus. so much more to see. we had a lot better view of the attractions from the height of the bus.also the bus was reasonable slow which gave us time enough for photos. it stopped at sparrow hill for 10 minutes for picture taking Read more Written September 20, 2018
  • fati666222 0 contributions 4.0 of 5 bubbles The best way to see Moscow We did both routes but if you have little time then only do the red route.Its very informative and it takes you to the important sights.The staff on the bus are very friendly and helpful. Read more Written August 20, 2018
  • adolfo17 0 contributions 3.0 of 5 bubbles The worst hope-on hope-off service I've ever seen Diffiult to understand the route maps and stops. Staff wouldn't help either. Lengthy stops. No air conditioning. Read more Written August 4, 2018
  • Peter F 0 contributions 3.0 of 5 bubbles Two Routes There is a short red route which depending on the traffic takes about an hour. The route is generally around the Red Square area. The ear phones were small and sometimes the commentary did not link up with the sites you were seeing. The green bus takes you on a longer route and ours took two and a half hours due to the heavy traffic. I would not recommend this trip unless it is raining or you want to fill in time. The sights we saw were nothing outstanding with plenty of time at certain stops for photos. Also the driver stop for a bite to eat at one stop. Read more Written July 30, 2018
  • Bernardo P 0 contributions 1.0 of 5 bubbles Boat Trips Moscow, Russia Yesterday, I booked a boat trip with the GetYourGuide.com web page and was totally horrible, didn’t have audio guide as it shows on the picture-Nobody Talk-. The girl on the picture-light blue bag-ask for 100 Rubles for show her the QR Code while I had the Booking and PIN number cause she must see the vessel name-Didn’t say nothing and after she said board any vessel. I suggest take the trip and pay on site, avoid fake internet pages, there are many other services with a lot of entertainment, don’t take this ones. Read more Written July 14, 2018
  • Kathrynowl91 0 contributions 3.0 of 5 bubbles Good way to see some sites We usually do these tours when we travel. They get you round and you see the sight . The traffic is quite heavy so it is a bit slow but there is not a lot they can do about it. We only did the red route. Just a note people don’t queue here when the bus comes it’s a bit of a free for all. Read more Written July 13, 2018
  • Daniyal91 0 contributions 3.0 of 5 bubbles Was Ok.! Started our tour of moscow from here, We had got the 2 Day Pass with the boat ride. The route and the map was good but not well managed. The bus didn't stop at many points. Were were unaware a couple of times at what point we were and missed them. Headphones and maps were provided. Would recommend one should check out the route map before going and decide which places to stop in advance, this way one can manage and enjoy the tour more and us it more effectively.! The boat ride was Ok, a little crowded. No guide provided, just a boat ride with restaurant service Read more Written July 12, 2018
  • WilliamDyer 0 contributions 1.0 of 5 bubbles Poor service on boat and too many waiting times on buses For the price, you should expect at minimum English speaking tour guides with decent experience, but at least in my case that did not happen both in buses and boats. And in the boat even tough we were 90% English speaking tourist at least, the tour guide spoke 95% of the time in Russia, and only 3 sentences in English, I really counted how many times she spoke in English. And at the end she asks us if we have any questions? Of course I told her I couldn’t ask her anything since I didn’t understand 95% of what she was saying. The boat tour is not worth it, just take the bus that would be my advice. Second minus is the waiting times, in the boat they made us wait an hour before it departed, and in many stops with the buses waiting times of 20-30 minutes. I actually think I lost that day around 2 hours doing nothing. Be careful. Read more Written July 10, 2018

Most Recent: Reviews ordered by most recent publish date in descending order.

Detailed Reviews: Reviews ordered by recency and descriptiveness of user-identified themes such as wait time, length of visit, general tips, and location information.

Guga guters

City Sightseeing Moscow Hop-On Hop-Off Bus Tour with Optional Cruise provided by City Sightseeing Moscow

IMAGES

  1. The 50 best trip-hop albums of all time

    classic trip hop

  2. Trip-hop: Classics By Trip-hop Masters

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  3. The 20 Best Trip-Hop Albums of All Time

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  4. - Trip-Hop Classics 1992-09 by Trip-Hop Classics 1992-09 (2011-03-11

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  5. Drum Pad Machine-Classic Trip Hop

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  6. Local Groove Does Good: The Story Of Trip-Hop's Rise From Bristol : The

    classic trip hop

VIDEO

  1. Oldschool HipHop #hiphop #oldschool #eastcoast #westcoast #beatmaking #damgoodmusic #dragandrazic

  2. The Papers

  3. part 2! classic trip to florida

  4. FREE 90's Old hop hop Sample Beat by indigo

  5. trip hop video "up there"

  6. Trip Hop Music

COMMENTS

  1. The 20 Best Trip-Hop Albums of All Time

    The term "trip-hop" was first coined in 1994, when a writer at the dance music bible Mixmag used it to describe DJ Shadow's ambitious single "In/Flux." The seeds of this new genre—the U.K.'s answer to America's burgeoning hip-hop movement—can be traced back to the late '80s and early '90s in Bristol, a bustling college town in South West England where pioneers of the so ...

  2. The 50 best trip-hop albums of all time

    For all these reasons and more, Psychoanalysis remains a slept-on classic from the 1990s, a half-way point between trip-hop's European roots and its infatuation with American hip-hop. 33. The ...

  3. Trip Hop Classics

    Share your videos with friends, family, and the world

  4. Best Trip Hop albums of all time

    Miki Nakatani 中谷美紀. 3.80 141. 10 November 1999. Art Pop Ambient Pop Trip Hop. J-Pop Glitch Pop Trip Hop Glitch Ambient. atmospheric ethereal lush soothing futuristic.

  5. The 10 greatest trip-hop bands of all time

    Formed in Hartlepool in 1994, Sneaker Pimps' debut album, Becoming X was a seminal trip-hop LP in 1996. Best known for the single '6 Underground', the band takes its name from an article the Beastie Boys published in their Grand Royal magazine about a man they hired to track down classic sneakers.. The band was created by electronic musician Liam Howe and guitarist Chris Corner, and then later ...

  6. Trip Hop: The Evolution from The Underground

    Trip Hop is of Bristol, UK origin from the late 80s/early 90s and embodies breakbeat influence, while keeping the psychedelic nature in the lyrics and instrumentation. "Downtempo" is of Ibiza, Spain origin which retains an ambient nature dedicated to chill-out spaces in the Ibiza clubs. There's a difference in the feel of the two sibling ...

  7. The Official Trip Hop Classics Top 100

    I created a playlist with the songs I bought from listology.com's The Official Trip Hop Classics Top 100's list. -http://www.listology.com/barttf/list/offici...

  8. Trip-Hop Music: The History and Artists of Trip-Hop

    Trip-hop's gloomy vocals, downbeat elements, and wistful jazzy sounds set it apart from the genres that inspire it. Originating in the United Kingdom, the subgenre of trip-hop is a blend of several musical styles, including acid jazz, hip-hop, reggae, and electronica. Trip-hop's gloomy vocals, downbeat elements, and wistful jazzy sounds set ...

  9. Maxinquaye: The Trip-Hop Classic That Made Tricky A ...

    Ably abetted by seasoned producer Mark Saunders (who brought something of his work with The Cure to proceedings), Tricky's late-night-toned, depressive, beautiful-ugly debut album was a No.3 UK ...

  10. The Official Trip Hop Classics Top 100

    I created a playlist with the songs I bought from listology.com's The Official Trip Hop Classics Top 100's list. -http://www.listology.com/barttf/list/official-trip ...

  11. Trip Hop Classics (1991-2001)

    Trip Hop Classics (1991-2001) - Triphop Classics 90s (100+ tracks) · Playlist · 250 songs · 31K likes

  12. Trip Hop Classics

    A new music service with official albums, singles, videos, remixes, live performances and more for Android, iOS and desktop. It's all here.

  13. The four best trip-hop bands of all time

    Trip-hop is a musical genre which emerged in the 1990s as a combination of other genres, mainly from hip hop, the dub, the reggae, jazz and soul. ... Mezzanine from 1998, containing the classic song teardrop y 100thWindow, from 2003, were also number one in the UK. This group has won several awards over the years and has sold more than 13 ...

  14. Making Portishead's "Dummy": The Production Experiments of a Trip-Hop

    A lot of bouncing to cassette," McDonald says in Portishead's Dummy by R.J. Wheaton. This explains the thin, Mellotron-like strings on "Glory Box": "instead of putting them to DAT [Digital Audio Tape] we put them to cassette, which I remember raised a few odd looks from people," McDonald recalls. To create the effect heard 30 seconds into ...

  15. 'Music dug up from under the earth': how trip-hop never stopped

    Joe Muggs. N obody really wanted to be trip-hop. The stoner beats of Nightmares on Wax's 1995 Smokers Delight album were era defining, but it carried the prominent legend: "THIS IS NOT TRIP ...

  16. List of trip hop artists

    Main page; Contents; Current events; Random article; About Wikipedia; Contact us; Donate

  17. Trip Hop Classics (1991-2001): Triphop Classics 90s (100 tracks)

    Selection of Trip Hop, Breakbeat, Downtempo & Nu Jazz, from mainly the 90s. Usual suspects and underground. || Massive Attack || Portishead || Tricky || Nigh...

  18. THE 10 BEST Moscow Hop-On Hop-Off Bus Tours

    512. Hop-On Hop-Off Tours • Sightseeing Tours. Balchug (Bolotny Island) By DebbJ. Only fault was the bus was sometimes full and you had to wait for the next one which was about 15 minutes (in the... 5. MotoTaxi 77 Moto Tourism - Day Tours. 8. Hop-On Hop-Off Tours • Motorcycle Tours.

  19. Beach Hop Festival 2024: Coromandel District prepares for influx of

    The 2024 Repco Beach Hop Festival kicks off in less than a month in the Coromandel District. Photo / Parkside Media. Less than four weeks remain until a celebration of classic cars and rock-n-roll ...

  20. Immersive trip down Hip Hop memory lane retraces the music genre's

    HOLLYWOOD, Calif. -- Hip Hop music has cemented itself in American culture. The immersive exhibition Hip Hop Til Infinity takes a retrospective look at the music genre's influence, featuring the ...

  21. Trip-Hop

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  22. The 20 Best Moscow Tours for 2022

    This tour is a perfect choice for those who wish to get to know Moscow in depth. One of the highlights of this package is the KGB history tour which gives an interesting perspective on the Cold War. You will also have time for exploring the city on your own or doing extra sightseeing. $ 941 From/Per person. Details.

  23. ⏩ 1990s Trip Hop

    Hope you enjoy my trip hop and downtempo playlist. Its a mix of classics and includes Massive Attack, Portishead, Tricky, DJ Shadow, Kruder & Dorfmeister, Bo...

  24. City Sightseeing Moscow Hop-On Hop-Off Bus Tour with Optional Cruise

    About. It can be hard to see the highlights of Moscow in a day or two, but this hop-on hop-off City Sightseeing open-top bus tour makes it easy and convenient. Take in views of the city while listening to recorded commentary on the bus. Hop off at any of the stops, including Red Square, the Big Stone Bridge, and Pushkin Fine Arts Museum.

  25. City SightSeeing

    Create your perfect combo. Take exploring to a whole new level and move your adventure to the water with our City Sightseeing Moscow River Cruise. You'll get a great view of the whole city as we travel down the Vodootvodny canal. You have the option of combining your Hop-On Hop-Off Bus Tour with the Boat Tour or you can just purchase your River ...