chill out (sometimes chillout), a term derived from a slang injunction to relax, emerged in the early and mid-1990s as a catch-all term for various styles of relatively mellow, slow-tempo music made by contemporary producers in the electronic music scene. A number of compilations with “Chill Out” in their titles were released in the mid-1990s and beyond, helping to establish the genre as being very closely related to downtempo and trip hop but also incorporating, especially in the early 2000s, slower varieties of house music, nu-jazz, psybient, and lounge music.
Lounge
Originally by Lounge the music playing in hotels, casinos and small cafes was meant. Usually performers consisted of one leading singer and one or two musicians, who played a song or music, written by other popular groups or singers (usually pop-style).
For instance, such groups as The Beatles and Led Zeppelin originally played Lounge, and it gives us a right to say that these eminent musicians made their contribution into creation and development of this music.
Right now Lounge is a branch of Chillout, a synonym of Downtempo style, and is a music for “background” during conversations between people in modern cafes and bars.
Downtempo
It is a background electronic music, which tempo is slower, than House-music (less, than 118 b.m.p.) and is essentially different from Ambient-style. This genre can include simultaneously such specific styles, as again, Lounge, Chillout, Trip-Hop, or Acid-Jazz. The music is usually intended for creation of friendly atmosphere of rest, different from dance culture, though a certain amount of releases was purposed for dance-floor music.
This genre kindredly matches with Dub, Hip-Hop, Jazz, Funk, Soul, Drum’n'Bass, Ambient and Pop, however it is often mistaken for closely-related IDM, Trip-Hop, and Acid-Jazz.
Since Downtempo and Lounge are very similar with each other, it is very hard to single out any particular representatives, who played using only one of these styles. Very often in albums of such musicians as Jose Padilla, Afterlife, Chris Coco, Lumininius, Christophe Goze, Blank & Jones(Relax), Lover’s Lane Monodeluxe you can distinguish both of these styles.
Acid-Jazz
This music is plaid by a generation of musicians, who grew up listening Jazz, Funk and Hip-Hop, and includes elements of all of these three styles. Such features of Acid-Jazz, as abundance of percussion sounds, as well as mainly live performance puts this style closer to jazz and Afro-Cuban music, rather than to other dance styles. On the other hand, a distinct groove combines Acid-Jazz with funk and hip-hop. The term appeared first in 1988, at that simultaneously both as the name of the American sound-recording label and English series of music collections, which contained reissued Jazz and Funk music of the 70’es and which earlier had been called rare groove by the British.
At present this style is known owing to such musician, as De-Phazz, Jazzamor, Gabin.
Bossa-Nova
It is an independent and very interesting kind of music, something like Latino style, but guitar-dominated, and with a soft male or female vocal. Bossa-Nova is just an instrumental style, which can be compared to variations on a subject of tango, slow salsa. An emphasis here is put mostly on depth and fullness of vocal, which is of prime importance in this genre.
The main representatives are such groups as 2Raum Wohnung, Mr. Electric Triangle, separate musical compositions of URBS.
Trip-Hop
The term Trip-Hop (known as well as Bristol Sound) was thought up by the British magazine Mixmag, when describing the music style of Dj Shadow, who, changing bit and reducing medium frequencies, took the listener to a real music journey. After that Trip-Hop started to be used as a name of music stream in the 90’es. This originated in England style was a mixture of Hip-Hop and House-music.
At present a House component disappeared from Trip-Hop. It became more melodic and not so quick.
The main representatives of the style are Portishead, Massive Attack, Tricky and Thievery Corporation. Names of London musicians Morcheeba and Glideascope are also often associated with this style.
Ambient
Brian Eno, a creator of a whole cultural layer, told a story that being in hospital, he listened to sounds of the ambient world (street noise, talks and movements in hospital, work of medical devices and so on) trying to find a hidden melody in them. Afterwards, an idea had fallen into his mind to include ambient noises into tracks, which later were released under the common name Ambient.
Ambient uses electronic reverberation and spatial sound technology. Sound plays more important role, than lyrics and music. The music is changing slowly, and is often repeated. That is why for unsophisticated listener it can seem alike, though content and timbre of ambient-performers’ compositions greatly differ from each other. The ambient style became a popular music in the beginning of the 90’es owing to ambient-techno musician The Orb and Aphex Twin (some people refer the latter composer also to disputable style IDM (Intelligent Dance Music), having original system of creating compositions and not always being objectively and sufficiently comprehensible for a listener. However, many DJs refer the IDM style partly also to Chillout-music).
Besides Brian Eno, the genre is presented also by Claus Shulze, Galaxy, Hemisphere.
Intelligent drum and bass (IDB)
(It is also known as Intelligent Jungle)
IDB - a term, describing drum-n-bass music, which is a cocktail of Lounge, Jazz, Ambient. This music has atmospheric sound with artificial “synthetic” elements and deep bass. It includes very often keyboards, guitar and in general string melodies with vocal as well. Soft Chillout component here forms a contrast to hard and sometimes aggressive dnb beats. IDB, named also Atmospheric Drum’n'Bass or “the Good Looking sound”, nevertheless is the most widely-used term. However LTJ Bukem one of the maestros of this style does not agree with such interpretation:
“In all dnb styles there is an “intelligent” basis, and it is incorrect to call particularly only one style “intelligent”.
The best known labels are: Liquid Sound Design, Vagalume, Ultimate and Interchill.
