Trip hop

Trip hop
Stylistic origins	Electronica breakbeat soul house hip hop dub funk jazz R&B ambient chill-out downtempo psychedelic lounge minimal alternative rock
Cultural origins	Early 1990s, Bristol, United Kingdom
Typical instruments	Keyboards (especially Rhodes) synthesizer samplers brass turntables strings guitar bass drums drum machines percussion saxophone flute
Subgenres
Illbient post-trip hop
Regional scenes
United Kingdom United States
Other topics
Bristol underground scene experimental hip hop neo soul nu jazz

Trip hop is a subgenre of electronic music that originated in the early 1990s in the United Kingdom, especially Bristol. Deriving from later idioms of acid house, the term was first used by the British music media and press as a way to describe the more experimental variant of breakbeat emerging from the Bristol Sound scene, which contained influences of soul, funk and jazz. It has been described as "Europe's alternative choice in the second half of the '90s", and "a fusion of hip hop and electronica until neither genre is recognisable". Trip hop music fuses several styles and has much in common with other genres; it has several qualities similar to ambient music, and its drum-based breakdowns share characteristics with hip hop. It also contains elements of R&B, dub and house, as well as other electronic music. Trip hop can be highly experimental.

According to Merriam-Webster's Dictionary, the term "trip-hop" was coined in 1989, though it first appeared in print in June 1994; Andy Pemberton, a music journalist writing for Mixmag, used it to describe Mo Wax Records Artist (U.K.) RPM and (American) DJ Shadow's "In/Flux" single.

In Bristol, once one of the most important ports in the Atlantic slave-trade and as of 2012^[update] among Britain's most racially diverse cities, hip hop began to seep into the consciousness of a subculture already well-schooled in Jamaican forms of music. DJs, MCs, b-boys and graffiti artists grouped together into informal soundsystems. Like the pioneering Bronx crews of DJs Kool Herc, Afrika Bambataa and Grandmaster Flash, the soundsystems provided party music for public spaces, often in the economically deprived council estates from which some of their members originated. Bristol's soundsystem DJs, drawing heavily on Jamaican dub music, typically used a laid-back, slow and heavy drum beat ("down tempo").

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