Chill-out music
| Chill-out | |
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| Stylistic origins | |
| Cultural origins | Early 1990s, Europe |
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Chill-out music (sometimes also chillout, chill out or simply chill) is a subgenre of electronic music and an umbrella term for several styles of electronic music characterized by their mellow style and mid-tempo beats, "chill" being derived from a slang word for "relax".
Chill-out music emerged in the early and mid-1990s in "chill rooms" at dance clubs, where relaxing music was played to allow dancers a chance to "chill out" from the more emphatic and fast-tempo music played on the main dance floor. Some notable chill-out artists include: Moby, Air, Paul Kalkbrenner, and Moonbootica.
The genres associated with chill-out are mostly ambient, trip hop, nu jazz, ambient house and downtempo. Sometimes, the easy listening subgenre lounge is considered to belong to the chill-out collection as well. Chill-out, as a musical genre or description, is synonymous with the more recently popularized terms "smooth electronica" and "soft techno", and it is a loose genre of music blurring into several other very distinct styles of electronic and lo-fi music.
"Chill out room" was at the legendary Madchester nightspot, Konspiracy. In these rooms, visitors would find couches, comfortable pillows, psychedelic light shows projecting entrancing images and music that was decidedly downtempo, especially when compared to what was going on a few feet away on the dance floor. Higher Intelligence Agency (the HIA) helped move the chill room concept from sideshow to main event with their Oscillate chill party events in Birmingham and elsewhere in the early to mid nineties. Their first releases came out on the now defunct Beyond record label and soon thereafter in the U.S. on the Waveform label - who describes the music as 'exotic electronica.'
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