Trip-Hop

Well, that’s settled — the only way you’re getting out of bed today is if it’s on fire. So yank that phone cord out of the wall, light some French vanilla candles, and fire up the following trip-hop tracks, from the sampledelic soul of Kruder & Dorfmeister and UNKLE to the shadowy film noir scores of Portishead and DJ Krush. And if you decide to get your heart going ever so slightly, nothing says, “Wham, bam, thank you ma’am” like the heavyweight drums and deftly scratched song snippets of Coldcut, Amon Tobin, and DJ Vadim.

The vibe of our Next Steps is just as varied, dropping familiar names alongside such underground beat conductors as Chocolate Weasel and Neotropic.

While trip-hop’s classic tracks (the mood-lighting melodies of “Karmacoma,” the scratchy, deep grooves of “Glory Box”) have set the scene in countless cocktail bars and chillout rooms, they also work wonders in woofer-wrecking car stereos and louder-than-thou living rooms. Take the laser-guided synth lines and horn-blasting spy grooves of “Atomic Moog 2000,” for instance: If that doesn’t make you want to join the next James Bond cast, we don’t know what will. And then there’s the steady build of “You Can’t Go Home Again,” a joy-ride record that barely lets go for seven minutes straight.

Kinda like the manic members of our Deep Cuts crew, starting with the crate-digger collages of David Holmes and DJ Food.

Sorry about suggesting that whole stay-in-bed thing. Now that we’re winding down our definitive Trip-Hop set, one thing’s for certain: this music isn’t meant just for moonlit evenings (dig: piano-led torch ballad “The Truth”) and lazy afternoons (the psychedelic pass-the-mic dynamics of “Dead Dogs Two”). It’s also ready and willing to slap your speakers around a bit, whether that means popping the champagne-like beats of “Witness (1 Hope),” struggling to keep up with the spastic drum & bass breaks of “Animal Chin,” or witnessing DJ Z-Trip absolutely own his two turntables in “Rhythmic Metaphor.”

Forget about the ’60s for a minute. Another British Invasion stormed our shores decades later — the Bristol-bred trip-hop movement, a stereoscopic explosion of heady hip-hop, rainbow-chasing psychedelic rock, latte-sipping jazz, and laid-back R&B that quickly grew into a full-on phenomenon. And with that came a mix of classic/cultish sides, songs that shift between tempos and tones like the mood of an unmedicated psych ward. So if you feel like closing your eyes and counting back from ten, there’s always the slow-burning soul of “Aftermath,” the space-age loops of “Maniac Melody,” and the shake, rattle, and roll of Fila Brazillia’s dub-driven Radiohead remix (“Climbing Up the Walls”). And if you’d prefer something a little more, well, banging, you’re welcome to cue up the snappy, battle-ready sample banks of Dabrye, Coldcut, and DJ Krush.