There's a story about the making of Dummy that I think about more than almost anything else I know about record production.
Geoff Barrow wanted breaks that sounded found. Not played, not programmed. Found. So Portishead hired a session drummer, cut the grooves to 16-track tape, and then had the results pressed onto vinyl. Fresh, clean, brand new records of their own material.
Then Barrow threw them on the studio floor and kicked them around. Scuffed them. Dragged them. Adrian Utley has described him scratching directly on the snare hit to make it go dull. Once the record sounded like something that had spent thirty years in a damp basement, they sampled it back off the deck and built the song out of that.
They manufactured artifacts in order to dig through them.
And part of the motive, reportedly, was defensive: put enough steps between yourself and your source and nobody in the scene can lift it off you. Which is the same instinct as a Bronx DJ soaking the label off a record so the guy leaning over the booth can't read it. Different decade, different city, identical paranoia.
That's trip hop. That's what the whole genre is made of.
The playlist
I put together Intro to Trip Hop. Eighteen tracks, an hour and thirty-six minutes. My one-line description of it is that this is music that could come out tomorrow and could also perfectly score an episode of Buffy, and I stand by that as a genre definition.
Bristol is most of the spine. Massive Attack twice, once with Tricky and 3D, once with Tracey Thorn on "Protection." Tricky again on his own with Martina Topley-Bird. Portishead twice, including "Roads," which was named after the broken Fender Rhodes they played it on.
Then it fans out. Cibo Matto opens it. DJ Shadow, DJ Krush, Morcheeba, Lamb, Hooverphonic, Depth Charge, Howie B, 9 Lazy 9, The Wiseguys. It closes on Björk and David Arnold.
Everything here is pointing at something else
Put "6 Underground" on and the horns and harp at the front of it are John Barry, lifted off "Golden Girl" from the 1964 Goldfinger soundtrack. The "a-one two" running through the Nellee Hooper version is De La Soul, off "Breakadawn." Sneaker Pimps weren't even from Bristol. They were from Hartlepool, and Chris Corner once described the band as <cite index="25-1">"The Stone Temple Pilots of The Bristol Sound, basically."</cite> Which is both a joke and an accurate credit.
Depth Charge built an entire catalog out of kung fu films. DJ Shadow made records almost entirely from other records. DJ Krush was a turntablist first.
None of this is background music, though it works beautifully as background music. It's a genre where the seams are the point. You can hear the edges of every borrowed thing, and the producers wanted you to.
One last thing
The playlist ends on "Play Dead," which Björk cut with David Arnold.
Arnold is the composer who would go on to inherit the James Bond franchise from John Barry.
So the record opens its Bond sample at track seven and closes, eleven tracks later, on Barry's successor. I did not plan that. I found it afterward, the way you find most good things, which is the entire argument this music makes about itself.
Listen here. Loud, ideally. Barrow has said as much about his own record.