NOW SPINNING
DUMMY
Portishead
TRIP-HOP • 1994 • GO! BEAT
In the early-mid 90s, we lived in London for a hot second, and bubbling just below the Blur/Oasis rivalry, the Shoe Gaze scene and the Madchester bands, there was a club culture of Drum & Bass and Jungle expoldiing in the underground.
Out of that stew, with elements of hip-hop, some jazzy samples and instrumentation added to it, and the beats slowed down, came a fully formed, new genre exploding out of Bristol led by Massive Attack, Tricky, and the biggest breakout of them all, Portishead.
The sound was immediately dubbed Trip Hop, a label Portishead reportedly hated, but no matter what it’s called, spinning ‘Dummy’ for the first time felt like a revolution had arrived. It’s insane to think this is the first record they made.
Geoff Barrow builds crooked, spy novel beats underneath Beth Gibbons ghostly, haunting vocals. The technique used to build these tracks is insane. Instead of sampling old records, they recorded tracks, pressed them to acetate, intentionally damaged those acetates to introduce clicks, pops and skips, and then played them on a turntable and recorded them through an Akai sampler.
Then they copied those samples to cassette tape, and bounced them back and forth between cheap decks to introduce intentionally warped, decaying textures. Adrian Utley recorded some of his instrumental parts into Dictaphones instead of standard mics.
Incredibly, 30 some odd years later, it still sounds vital and new. Absolutely essential. Play it loud through a speaker system and it sounds massive; put it on through good headphones, and you might think something is wrong with you, in the best possible way.
LISTEN & BUY
If at all possible, buy it at your local record store.