Is it time for a TRIP HOP revival yet?

yeah i guess... dunno where yr from, but i kind of feel this w. finney, who is (obv) great at the formalist stuff -- living through trip-hop in the uk (its main base, right?) you just end up with this perspective on it. is it hot, does anyone give a shit any more? stuff like that. 4tet was a friend of a friend, he djed at a party we had. none of us was a stay-at-home cornball rly!

A lot of artists made transitions from "warm" to "cold" (insofar as sampled drum breaks are "warm" and programmed beats are "cold") at around this point.

A good example of the shift is from Post to Homogenic: from sampladelic technicolour to robo-sheen.

Or from Crazysexycool to Fanmail

Or from Bedtime Stories to Ray Of Light

One artist I've never quite gotten is DJ Cam. All the stuff I've heard by him was v. v. dry and limp.

It just wasn't very cool. Dare I say that oftentimes (not always) British popular music of black origin can seem a bit ungenuine/uncool when compared to their American counterparts? Many of the TripHop bands I lump together with Aswad and Zion Train - acts that tried very hard but became the pasttime of a certain type of person - being used constantly on TV ad slots, or being praised by the socks'n'sandals crowd. TripHop made out that it was all dark and underground but really it was the soundtrack to a thousand crap dinner parties.

Fourtet came out of the IDM scene and was one of the forerunners for the bastard child Folktronica - any musical similarities to Trip Hop are coincidental.

I see Trip Hop as a fad that was at it's biggest between 1996-1998 and disappeared as quickly as it appeared.
The music generally had a gloomy, murky dubbed out feel, often mixing downtempo hiphop beats and jazz/blues samples with every mid-90s rockist's favourite sound of "scratching". Generally there'd be a laconic rapper with an Afro-Bristolian accent or a female singer crooning sultrily as if she was wrapped in a blanket of cigarette smoke. Or both.
The majority of bands took their queues from, well, Massive Attack mainly who made a big wave of Bristolian sound-a-likes, some better than others. Promising bands like Portishead and Sneaker Pimps quickly fell into a creative rut when they realised they only had one idea. And then there was the inexplicably popular yet incredibly bland Morcheeba who sadly managed to out-last most of the decent crop.

tim -- always with the hot-and-cold!

similarities to fourtet are "coincidental", huh?

True, true. The sampled loops got replaced by bleeps and hits. Breaks became Electro. Jazzy Drum'n'Bass became Digital Drum'n'Bass. Chillout became Minimal/Microhouse. Trip Hop became (?) I'm tempted to say the stuff on the Global Communications Fabric mix would count as Trip Hop for the digital revolution.

problem here: 'frozen' (craig armstrong arrangement! kinda mezzaniney?), and 'ray of light' (very warm record!).

Madonna in 'Ray Of Light' phase was all about converting the 90s stuff she dug but had failed to incorporate in her work prior to that point hence trying to get Aphex to produce it originally, then Howlett before settling on Orbit (whose 'Strange Cargo' albums laid whales and dolphins and Beth Orton over 'Trip-Hop beats' but also good for that trance lean she seemed to want). she got the Kruder & Dorfmeister remix treatment round that time too.

yes, this is because the whole hot/cold thing is overplayed! most trip hop sounded boring and clinical, ie cold!

what it means is that in 00s pop music started being informed primarily by Electro rather than primarily by Funk as it had been in the 90s.

xpost

i was that age too, but i have a strong feeling it's no straw man but a real thing. like in 'this life' innit.

oh, but you will because this looks excellent:

http://www.soulseduction.com/common/item_detail.php?ItemID=162539

it opens with David Behrman!

ha ha I knew you'd jump on that, which is why I put them in scare quotes.

Completely OTM re 'This Life' - they got the 'young professionals' soundtrack just right for the era - lots of trip hop and mellow indie (i certainly remember Drugstore, Mazzy Star must have been featured at least once too)

this applies to...all art, all human endeavor maybe?

Far enough, but the Star Trek sample cracks me up every time. I didn't even know there was a second album.

That said I have no problem with dinner party music. Not everyone chooses their social networks by shared musical tastes, so you need a shortlist of music that is unlikely to irritate people excessively in a social setting.

devoid of context that is a fucking great title for an album.

trip hop = 'trance hip hop' and was coined in the melody maker in a review of the chemical brothers (then the dust brothers), maybe of 'my mercury mouth' or one of the pre-name-change singles. ('93 maybe?) So it was originally used to describe what became big beat (which they had a hard time coming up with the name for), but then the usage slipped. I'm with Vahid, though. They're basically the same thing. The female singer thing is a ruse. It's just instrumental hip hop, innit?

along with Headz, Kruder & Dorfmeister's DJ Kicks mix is another major trip-hop touchstone though it touches on DnB (Aquasky) and does feature Hardfloor (but in 'trip-hop' mode).

That thing about scratching being the 90s rockist sound of choice. Haha. THAT WAS ME.

God I feel old.

On the other end of the spectrum, it turned into Groove Armada.

Groove Armada only have ONE trip-hoppish song tho!