Bristol gets the credit: the Wild Bunch sound system, Smith & Mighty, and the records, Massive Attack’s Blue Lines, Portishead’s Dummy, Tricky’s Maxinquaye, that turned a local scene into an international reference point. Vivien Goldman’s history for NPR traces the overlapping sound-system, reggae and hip-hop communities behind the music. Trip-hop combines hip-hop’s sampling and beat-making with electronic production, often drawing on soul, jazz and dub.
The Canadian records below took that starting point in different directions. None of the artists would necessarily call their music trip-hop; one of them called it trip-rock. But the studio is doing the same kind of work in all of them: beats and samples holding space for a voice, or a voice becoming part of the production. That’s the thread worth following.
Esthero: Breath From Another (1998)
Esthero’s ambitions were initially local. In an interview with Chaos Control, she recalled wanting to make a record, build a band and “release it on white label vinyl and take over Toronto!” She and Martin “Doc” McKinney’s debut ultimately arrived through Work Records. Their process ran in both directions: she might sing over a beat while McKinney built chords around it, or he would bring a developed piece for her to write to. Both played guitar.
“Heaven Sent” was the turning point, the song where, as she put it, she began discovering her own voice and the partnership clicked. Start there, then “That Girl.” And follow McKinney forward: his later production work with the Weeknd draws another line from this 1998 record into Canadian R&B.
Elsiane: Hybrid (2007)
Elsiane formed in Montreal in 2000, pairing Elsieanne Caplette, classically trained at the Lima Conservatory in Peru, with self-taught drummer Stéphane Sotto, according to the duo’s official biography. Their debut puts the voice at the centre, then keeps moving it around. Start with “Mend (to Fix, to Repair)”: Slant’s contemporary review describes the vocal as spliced into a stuttering effect, set against the distorted voice on “Morphing” and the textural singing on “Ecclesia.” The question to carry across the record is when Caplette’s voice is delivering the song and when the production has turned it into another instrument.
Beast: Beast (2008)
Betty Bonifassi and Jean-Phi Goncalves, both originally from France, started with a proposed one-off song, “Devil,” and ended up with a band. Bonifassi had sung for Les Triplettes de Belleville; Goncalves had an established production career. A Georgia Straight interview describes gospel elements on “Satan,” industrial guitar on “Finger Prints,” and jazz-inflected vocals over spy-film guitar on “Out of Control.” Try “Mr. Hurricane” first, then listen after Elsiane for how the duo makes room for gospel and rock inside electronic arrangements.
A related listen: Sixtoo
Sixtoo’s Chewing on Glass & Other Miracle Cures belongs here through method rather than sound: instrumental hip-hop built by recording musicians specifically to sample and rearrange them, with Can’s Damo Suzuki and members of Godspeed You! Black Emperor among the contributors, as Ninja Tune’s biography explains. Start with “Storm Clouds & Silver Linings”. After the singer-producer partnerships above, it shifts the attention to the producer’s handling of performances made for the project, not found on records.