Trip-hop

Bristol is renowned as a city where the pull of the past — preserved in buildings, churches and monuments ranging from the Gothic to Brunel's Victorian landmarks — coexists with the pathways of modernity along which the English economy moves. It was probably one of these very paths that, in the early 80s, was taken by the Wild Bunch, a DJ collective that, with a revolutionary soundsystem, managed to seize on the new electronic wave just then emerging from the clubs of Detroit and Chicago, capturing the spirit of the times.

With punk-like wit and skill, the Wild Bunch blended the latest electronic motifs with the heavier tones of hip-hop, the elongated ones of dub and the carefree ones of reggae, but in downbeat rather than upbeat fashion, as was customary in the techno and house music just then being born in the US — that is, slowing the rhythm right down so that the tempo dropped below 120 bpm.

In the lively nights of Bristol, the sound bearing the city's own name takes shape, and some of the figures who would go on to turn this city into the most fervent musical laboratory of the late millennium begin to emerge.

The first names that must be mentioned are Tricky (later known simply as Tricky), Mushroom, 3D and Daddy G, who first founded Massive Attack in 1987 and then released "Blue Lines" in 1991 (Tricky, however, would never be an official member of the band, despite being one of its founders: his role within the group was limited to that of a collaborator).

"Blue Lines", the debut album by Massive Attack, unveils a multifaceted slice of electronic music never explored before: made up of tense, restless sounds, partly due to its melancholic streak, partly to its dub component; embellished with clearly enunciated vocals that hold their own against the sonic vibrations they evoke; and steeped in hip-hop-derived basslines that, rather than conjuring New York sunshine, cast the murky atmosphere one finds walking through the city at night.

The warm voices of Tricky, Horace Andy — the reggae legend who would recur often on their records — and soul chanteuse Shara Nelson alternate throughout, with Nelson carrying "Unfinished Sympathy", the single with the hypnotic, aching groove, to success. From the pitch-black bass of "Sale From Harm" to the sinuous "blue lines" of the title track, from the mighty dub of "Five Man Army" to the near-gospel shades of "Hymn Of The Big Wheel", Massive Attack revolutionize dance music with an alchemy built entirely on sampling, dreamlike atmospheres and the interplay between rap and soul singing, effectively inventing the first embryonic form of trip-hop. Atmospheric, narcotic, travel music (the "trip"), which slows down hip-hop and house pulses to achieve a more relaxed, dreamlike effect. Cerebral music, and yet deeply physical, with those dub basslines that hit you right in the gut.

In 1994 Massive Attack strike again with "Protection", which scales back the soul elements to further develop the dance rhythm set in motion by the previous album. The long reggae nightmare of "Karmacoma", sung in Tricky's cavernous register, is the new manifesto of a sound growing ever murkier, more narcotic and more sophisticated, brushing up against depths of melancholy in the near-lounge of "Weather Storm" (featuring Craig Armstrong on piano) and in the title track, where the voice of Tracey Thorn — who had made the fortune of Style Council in the height of 80s "new cool" fever — shines once again.

1994, however, is also the year another band made its debut, coming from a tiny neighbouring hamlet overlooking the ocean. A place that, from an obscure dot on the map of England, would become synonymous with the worldwide epic of trip-hop. Portishead is in fact the name of the town where Geoff Barrow, a young multi-instrumentalist and producer, spent his youth — though he had already made a name for himself in Bristol by collaborating with Massive Attack and Tricky. In a recording studio, Barrow meets Beth Gibbons, a "pub singer", slight and painfully shy, yet with a soul fire in her veins and a burning passion for performers like Billie Holiday, Janis Joplin, Elizabeth Fraser and Astrud Gilberto.

This is how Portishead came to be. More than just a band, a fully-fledged artistic project, curated down to the smallest detail, from the minimalist artwork to the production of the music videos.

Their debut album Dummy, recorded with sound engineer Dave MacDonald and jazz guitarist Adrian Utley, spreads over the dub framework built by Massive Attack a noir-jazz sensibility borrowed from B-movie soundtracks of the 60s and 70s, arranged and reinvented by Barrow, blended with lounge touches (vintage-flavoured moog and hammond) and slowed-down hip-hop rhythms, all steeped in smoky, desolately romantic retro atmospheres. What ennobles this blend of sounds is Gibbons's aching voice, at times tense and harrowing, at times warm and sensual, as on the slow "Glory Box", a mournful meditation on women's tribulations, or on the seductive "Mysterons". The emotional climax, though, is the single "Sour Times", a postmodern torch-song driven by a Lalo Schifrin sample: Utley's guitars and Barrow's chiselled scratches and keyboards conjure a spectral mood, over which a sumptuous melody takes flight, sung by a despondent Gibbons. The jazz imprint brought by the eclectic Utley is more evident on tracks like "Strangers" and "Pedestal", while "Roads" pairs moaning guitars with a retro orchestration, propelled by solemn strings. Gibbons returns to the fore on the melancholic "It Could Be Sweet", the obsessive "Numb" and the driving lied of "Wandering Star", where she plays the chanteuse of a smoky, nocturnal cabaret.

Dummy is indeed the definitive manifesto of the trip-hop revolution, but it's also the work that, more than any other, transcends the boundaries of that genre, arriving at the new frontier of a music that is as retro (in spirit) as it is modern (in approach). Portishead's work sinks its roots into the sorrow of blues and the open-hearted confessions of soul; it absorbs the anguish and sluggish temperament of darkwave, the anger of hip-hop, the obsessiveness of techno. And it manages to dress them up in ballads of icy elegance, thanks also to an orchestral taste that never goes over the top.

The following album, Portishead (1997), would accentuate the darker side of their music, with more frequent use of real instruments and a greater hip-hop leaning than on the debut. Everything would be even more tortuous and hermetic. As on the opening "Cowboys", where a scratch-riddled electro-lounge intro is punctuated by dark guitar twangs, over which Gibbons's anguished voice looms large. Or on the single "All Mine", which oscillates between jazzy touches and Hitchcockian noir climaxes. But it's "Humming" above all that stands as the peak of this new phase for the band, with the theremin's spine-chilling wail evoking spectral scenarios, over which Gibbons's soprano raises its distressing requiem, syncopated by the beats. Less explosive and less immediately captivating, Portishead's second album wouldn't repeat the success of Dummy, but over time it would earn its rightful reputation as the ideal soundtrack for a desolate, metropolitan fin de siècle.

Just as Portishead's single "Glory Box" exports the Bristol sound abroad, racing up radio playlists all over the world, in 1995 Tricky unveils Maxinquaye, which highlights the artistic maturity that pushed him to break with Massive Attack and try his hand at a solo career.

With mixed African, Irish and Jamaican blood running through his veins, Adrian Thaws aka Tricky carries a wound that has never healed: when he was 4, his mother took her own life. "Maxinquaye" was her nickname, and her spirit is evoked throughout the record's grooves. On this album, undoubtedly more tied to the cadences of traditional hip-hop, all of Tricky's attempts to render the Bristol sound liquid and lake-still hover in the air, sampling or producing dark, dreamy melodies that are lightly set ablaze by the voice of the then fifteen-year-old debutante Martina Topley Bird.

Bristol's imp filters and manipulates the most disparate material: here Isaac Hayes's baritone resurfaces, slowed down and dehumanised, on "Hell Is Round The Corner", a rust-covered, retro-futurist music box spun at 78 rpm, tortured by industrial presses and synths; here a lazy drum line from the Smashing Pumpkins is sampled as the skeleton of the "raga-hop" of "Pumpkin", where the voice of fellow debutante Alison Goldfrapp floats like a dragonfly, or again an unrecognisable fragment of "Bad" (Michael Jackson) compressed into "Brand New You're Retro", a harangue punctuated by pulsing gears and almost cartoonish effects: pure "hip-pop" tailor-made for the dancehall. The ultimate drift of this process is the sheer, plain accumulation of sonic events: "Strugglin'", perhaps the most alienating 6:38 minutes ever produced within trip-hop, with an extremely slow loop, judgement-day trumpets, rhodes reduced to a sludgy paste, textbook horrorcore effects.

Tricky's female alter ego is his vocalist and girlfriend Martina, with her thin voice, bluesy phrasing and a hint of huskiness. Where Gibbons offers herself up as the last, painful banner of humanity set against the overwhelming power of machines, Martina's is a trance-chant for anesthetised souls (listen to her on "Aftermath", a toxic wasteland frozen in a still frame, barely redeemed by an enchanting flute, wah-wah guitar and the graininess of the breakbeat), a shadow zone in which every breath takes on an outsized weight ("Overcome" and its lunar, mechanised cadence, another dark masterpiece of the Bristol style).

The album's only cover is Public Enemy's "Black Steel", on which Topley Bird leads a noise-rock dance of sulphurous guitars and accelerated ragga jolts.

If Massive Attack's aura hovered in the ether as the hypothesis of a "dreamy" soundsystem, and Portishead confined their "active" recycling work to lounge-jazz, soul and spy-movie soundtracks, Tricky is the black hole, the emotional-semiotic dumping ground of an entire sonic civilisation.

Recalling the earliest stirrings of the Bristol sound, we must also not forget Smith & Mighty, devotees of the more expressly dub-reggae side within the same Wild Bunch collective. For those who don't know, Smith & Mighty produced Massive Attack's first single, "Any Love" (1988).

After various misadventures with major label Company London Records and the eventual split from it, they release on their own new label the historic "Bass Is Maternal" (1995), a tribute to their beloved research into low end. Ironically, in the version currently in circulation, the bass tones are even deeper, since what you're hearing is the dub rework of the original, which was lost when the group was under contract with Company London Records.

Also worth mentioning are Monk & Canatella, so melancholic and cinematic on "Care In The Community" (1996) that they might seem like Portishead followers, were it not for the fact that the American version of "Sour Times" features "A Tribute To Monk & Canatella", a personal homage from Gibbons and Barrow that may hint at tacit influences.

A particular niche all of their own would later be carved out by London's Archive, formed by Darius Keeler and Danny Griffiths, perhaps the most important "non-Bristol" exponents of the first wave. A multifaceted outfit, always busy blending and reshuffling the most varied genres between pop, electronica and rock with a "Floydian" approach. Their career is eclectic and kaleidoscopic, but it starts precisely from trip-hop, with a little gem like "Londinium" (1996), where the typical Bristol beat is fused with dreamlike, melancholic atmospheres, chamber-music inserts and soft, lulling tones that probe people's feelings, anxieties, hopes and emotions. The atmospheres and approach recall an album of an entirely different kind, "Hex" by fellow townsmen Bark Psychosis: their own dilated, atmospheric rock, in fact, likewise offers a soft, meditative solution, a work of introspection amid muted, evocative sonorities set against everyday chaos.

By the mid-90s, the press was tired of endlessly discussing a genre with no name, so it decided to christen it itself as trip-hop, hip-hop that, being English, is more sophisticated, so much so that it sends you on a trip...

Now officially dubbed trip-hop, in the second half of the 90s the Bristol sound infiltrates every context, especially television and film; sometimes it sounds like electronic-ised rock, other times like dancehall pop, but most of the time it stays true to its black musical spirit and, in electro guise, underscores notes of R&B, funk and free-jazz, heading towards breakbeat and D&B.

Trip-hop is now everywhere, but nobody realizes it. In exchange, it has lost the dark freshness that Massive Attack & co. had given it at its debut.

Post-trip-hop, to use the term coined specifically by The Independent, is spearheaded by English bands such as Alpha (trip-hop & downtempo), Gorillaz (somewhere between alternative rock and trip-hop: trip-rock), partly Lamb, early Moloko (before their dance turn), Mandalay, Mono (on their one and only, unmissable "Formica Blues"), Morcheeba, Red Snapper (whose distinguishing trait is hybridizing dub, trip-hop, reggae, funk and jazz-rock touches), Sneaker Pimps, Unkle (the crossover-ization of trip-hop courtesy of Lavelle and Dj Shadow), Zero 7 (again trip-hop & downtempo); though foreign names also pop up, such as: Lovage, Halou, Hooverphonic, Terranova.

Furthermore, throughout the '90s many vocalists coming from other musical backgrounds, drawing on collaborations with producers-musicians who came up around the Bristol scene (Nellee Hooper, Tricky, Howie B, Ben Young, Barrow himself before meeting Beth Gibbons), lent their voices to sounds enamored of trip-hop: such is the case of the glacial Bjork on her "Debut" and "Post", Neneh Cherry on leave from Rip Rig & Panic, Alison Moyet, who emerged as the queen of English electronic pop with Yazoo, not to mention a future, splendid Emiliana Torrini on "Love In Time Of Science" (1999) — though that already belongs to trip-hop's future, and we need to stay within the time frame in question (mid-'90s) to follow it step by step. A similar case is made by Bowery Electric, who, starting out from noise and shoegaze drones, grew infatuated with the Bristol style and hybridized it with their own, eventually turning fully trip-hop with "Lushlife" (2000).

While the British sound rises up feeding on Bristol formulas, trip-hop starts to fragment and branch out into offshoots.

There's someone like James Lavelle, who rejects the limiting definition of trip-hop and deliberately invents his own label, Mo' Wax, to make room for abstract hip-hop which — as Zingales points out — sounds on listening like a "progressive version of hip-hop", but which in the mind of Mo' Wax's owner is meant to be "the musical expression of an emotion: hip-hop with a soul" (these exact words appear printed on the sleeves of his releases).

Opening the abstract hip-hop vein launched by Mo' Wax in 1996 are two records: Dj Shadow's "Endtroducing", in which the art of recycling every sound, noise and even orchestral music or film scores gets room to breathe, turning hip-hop instrumental; and Dj Cam's "Substances", which helps chart this path made of sampling and turntablism, adding to the hip-hop, jazz and funk blend arranged by Dj Shadow the Arabic melodies sung by the alluring Kalkoli Sengupta. It should be kept in mind, however, that these releases were anticipated by a couple of years by Dj Krush's "Strictly Turntablized", the first record ever released on Mo' Wax.

Though it sprang up in another corner of trip-hop, the label running parallel to Mo' Wax is Ninja Tune, the creation of Matt Black and Jonathan Moore, better known under the alias Coldcut, the pioneers of English sampling. Emerging with the boom of London acid-house in the late '80s, Coldcut proved themselves skilled producers and masters of sampling technique. It was them, in fact, who pushed the modern remix into the electronic mainstream. A hugely successful record like "What's That Noise?" ('89) attests to all this. Around the turn of the '90s, Matt Black and Jonathan Moore, riding the Bristol experimental wave, changed course and, founding the Ninja Tune label and the Dj Food project, set off in pursuit of a new electronic sound to explore.

Thanks to many eclectic, disparate and almost unrepeatable releases, including those by: Funki Porcini ("Hed Phone Sex", '95), Dj Food ("A Recipe For Disaster", '95), Irresistible Force ("It's Tomorrow Already", '98), Ninja Tune manages to outline hip-hop-derived breakbeat through a catalogue so varied and vast as to include even a few gems of abstract hip-hop released by Dj Vadim in his early days ("USSR Repertoire", '96; "USSR: Life From The Other Side", '99), plus a wealth of work by artists such as Cinematic Orchestra, The Herbaliser and Up, Bustle and Out, representatives of nu-jazz, a musical current whose traits are hard to pin down and that is always in constant ferment.

Part of the current that will follow the footsteps of slow, atmospheric dub is called "downtempo". The term acts as an umbrella for a varied array of substyles descending from Bristol downbeat that, moving at an imperceptible pace — just as they sound — keep multiplying while remaining undefined and beyond any clear-cut classification.

What certainly prevails in this category is chill-out, the frozen electronic beat, known as the smooth electronica that accompanies aperitifs, its rhythm made fizzy yet relaxing by pinches of exotic torpor.

Even though it's easily recognizable by ear, chill-out lacks specific traits that could define it on paper. Only those who really know it can put it into words: "Chill-out is a state of mind able to create its own space by merging setting and sound. It's a long drink sipped through a long sunny day. It's a moment of pause taken to appreciate the beauty of the simplest things" (Chris Coco, one of the most authoritative DJs on the international chill-out scene).

As an element belonging to club culture, for which the club is the setting where music is at home, chill-out comes across as the non-genre par excellence, one that energizes its surroundings, fills atmospheric voids, and thus lends itself as the soundtrack to any venue open to the public: restaurants, bars, cafés, hotels. It is in fact these venues that shaped its history throughout the '90s — just think of all those world-famous spots that release a chill-out compilation under their own name every year: Café del Mar, Buddha Bar, Hotel Costes. Music devoted not only to socializing, if it's true that in the '90s chill-out revived ambient (yes indeed, Brian Eno had predicted chill-out!). Deep in "atmosphere", shut in a room while the record spins on the turntable, one can serenely let go, rocked by that soothed harmony. New Age itself made use of it for its therapeutic purposes.

A multifunctional music, then, devoid of any real original purpose. Unless you trace it back to "The Land Of Oz", an acid-house night thrown by Paul Oakenfold in the late '80s at Heaven, a London disco-club. It was precisely on Heaven's upper floor, during an Oz night, that one could enjoy an extraordinary decompression space called "White Room", curated by Alex Paterson together with his colleague Jimmy Cauty (at the time they still shared the Orb project), where, at a lower-than-usual volume, the notes of Pink Floyd, Brian Eno and Mike Oldfield flowed together into an intriguing, ecstatic mixage. Well, in this "White Room" lies the embryo of today's chill-out, an extremely singular and soothing disco-music meant to help all of Heaven's regulars soothe mind and body in an oblivious bath and burn off the adrenaline built up from house and techno beats.

In 1990 Paterson and Cauty split up, though, contrary to what one might have expected at the time, it turned out to be a split highly fruitful for dance music, because while Paterson, backed by Kris Weston and Thomas Fehlmann, would carry on Orb to epic, mind-blowing successes, Cauty teamed up with Bill Drummond and, under the alias Klf, released "Chill Out" that same year, 1990.

Klf's "Chill Out" stealthily anticipates Orb's next moves, sealing the birth of a new electronic genre. The title says it all: "Chill Out" shapes the airs played in the 'White Room'. It's music that universalizes sound, that runs along the surfaces of everyday life, that neutralizes everything around us: the radio left on (perhaps just as it plays an old Elvis song), the commute to work, a summer trip, a daydream, urban noise, melodies from the past settled in the mind that come back to us.

"Chill Out" is followed swiftly, in the same year, by "Space", with which the Klf set off into space.

The following year "The Orb's Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld", naturally released by the Orb, flies even higher and causes an immediate sensation. Ambient-house is officially born.

On an immense scale (the album alone, split across the two discs "Orbit" and "Ultraworld", runs nearly two hours) "The Orb's Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld" revives kosmische rock, spreading in electronic waves that exceptional Pink Floyd sense of spaciousness, conjured with the help of a complex array of samples that blend domestic noise with the din of the city, the clatter of the outside world and new digital sonorities; but above all "Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld" synthesizes into a single formula — one that would soon acquire the iridescent name of ambient-house — this interplanetary sprawl, the splashes of acid-house, the euphoria Eno instilled in his ambient work, and the fluids of dub.

The double album contains the manifesto of ambient-house, "A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules From The Centre Of The Ultraworld", composed and released back in '89, when the Orb still consisted of Paterson and Cauty. For twenty minutes straight, a vortex built on a repeating eight-note scale ensnares the listener: sounds and noises fleeting and scattered across time and the planet, echoes of Pink Floyd, liturgical choirs and the voice of Minnie Riperton singing "Lovin' You".

Within two or three years this musical field is reinvigorated by a string of acclaimed records: "The White Room" ('91) by the Klf, "U.F.Orb" ('92) by the Orb, "Flying High" ('92) and "Global Chillage" ('94) by Irresistible Force, the moniker of a certain Mixmaster Morris who, captivated by Paterson's dj sets, took him as a model and who, as already mentioned, would later move on to breakbeat productions.

Dizzying vibrations, those of ambient-house, foreshadowing the approach of another kind of ambient, still electronic in nature.

An embryonic English techno (Orbital, Lfo) likely served as the launchpad for a whole category of releases: "Microgravity" ('91) by Biosphere; "Bytes" ('93) by Black Dog; "Incunabula" ('93) by Autechre; "Selected Ambient Works 85-92" ('93) and "Selected Ambient Works Volume II" ('94) by Aphex Twin; "Lifeforms" ('94) by The Future Sound of London; "76:14" ('94) by Global Communication. Records that, propelled by the rhythmic and melodic drive of the earliest techno (the Detroit genesis being the absolute reference point) and with an ambient appeal (Paterson and colleagues supplying these artists with foundations to build on), pour into an ultrasound poised between noise and softness, sparseness and abundance, harmony and tension. It could hardly be called anything other than ambient-techno.

Most of these works memorably found their patron in Sheffield's Warp, which, among other things, launched the seminal "Artificial Intelligence" series starting in 1992. On the cover of the first volume, a humorous illustration depicting a robot sitting in an armchair, relaxing and enjoying "electronic listening music", signalled the new "intelligent" turn electronic music was taking.

This comes across almost as an anti-commercial move against the unruly production and frenzied consumption of rave and club techno, paving the way for techno's experimental side; the latter is reinterpreted and repackaged as cerebral music, meant for pure home listening rather than physical dancefloor use, capable of reaching minimal peaks that verge on the inconceivable. Hence the name "intelligent techno", later transformed into the now-current label of IDM (Intelligent Dance Music). A strand of production that remains highly fruitful to this day, if one thinks of the countless wonders of Boards of Canada.

But strictly speaking, chill-out refers to electronic backdrops that capture the naturalness of jazz and hip-hop, spiced with an effervescent blend of sounds drawn from every corner of the globe.

Having explored and celebrated the cosmos, neo-ambient abandons the ultraworld and returns to travel across the earth, taking on a continental flavour streaked with folkloric details and establishing itself as the leisure-time music of the perfect cosmopolitan Generation Xer.

The finish line would be crossed at the end of the '90s, when chill-out would circulate freely in the record market, specifically labelled as a genre, but something was already in the air with "Smokers' Delight" ('95) by Nightmares On Wax and "Leftism" ('95) by Leftfield.

The former is almost (depending on one's point of view) the cornerstone of compilation-style chill-out. In a hazy tracklist crafted by a single hand, George Evelyn, every single track is a distinct atmospheric cue that helps shape a state of mental balance evoking a peace of the senses. While adopting the same trip-hop technique of digging up and remixing old songs, "Smokers Delight", warm as the Jamaican colours reproduced on its cover, nonetheless sits at the opposite end of the spectrum from the murkier Massive Attack and Portishead.

"Leftism", filed under progressive house, has been credited as one of the cornerstones of '90s dance music. Though it takes dance as its starting point, "Leftism" projects itself far beyond: it's one of the first records to put vocals over dancefloor tracks, and it offers a glimpse of today's urban world. Crossover to its very core (dub, afro-funk, ambient-house, techno, and the gem of John Lydon's performance on the now-legendary "Open Up"), it managed to win over even rock fans with its unleashed frenzy, shuffling the deck almost to the point of weaving together a whole new underground scene.

Chill-out, now fully formed, is speckled with popular flavours, and it shows in the way it spreads too, moving across Europe and making the continent resemble a cheetah's coat. The djs involved in shaping chill-out are in fact scattered more or less everywhere across the Old Continent, as well as in the more predictable United States.

For instance, if we happened to find ourselves in Vienna looking for a bit of refreshment in some cozy lounge bar along Mariahilferstraße, the shopping street, at the sight of a barman finishing off a cocktail by pouring a cascade of ice cubes into the glass, the connection to Kruder & Dorfmeister would inevitably arise — their "Dj Kicks" (1996), the most refined entry in the series, could easily set the mood, and the term chill-out would fit like a glove.

There are even those who've suggested they were the ones who invented modern chill-out. What's certain is that listening to "K&D Sessions" (1998), which is nothing more than a collection of scattered remixes made for other well-known musical acts, answers the question "What is chill-out?". A double compact disc that shows off a bright, sparkling sound, skilfully played out across a tub of ingredients: a dub that sounds like a courteous continuation of the finest Jamaican tradition of the 70s, a hip-hop that dishes out honest basslines, and bossa nova, one of the many world musics that chill-out draws on in its expression.

Generally soft and eccentric, occasionally velvety, chill-out makes it plain to see: it loves world music.

And while bossa nova bubbles up here and there, other Latin persuasions can be traced in Gotan Project, who delight in offering supple reworkings of Argentine tango, in Quantic, who season their dishes with a good dose of salsa, in the samba-paced trip-hop of Smoke City, or in the proper samba of Brazilian pop singer Bebel Gilberto.

And who's to say that today you can't savor the chill-out flavor even in the afrobeat of Fela Kuti, which, in ever-increasing doses since the late 90s, has been blended with funk, jazz and sometimes electronic music by groups like Afrodizz, Antibalas and Kokolo?

Heading East, welcome are Thievery Corporation, who now and then weave Indian folk into their signature sound, or you can always fly on the Arabian carpets produced by Dzihab & Kamien, and the same experience could be repeated by listening to Banco De Gaia, who condense Middle Eastern resonances into a psychedelic dub in line with that of Sounds From The Ground and Loop Guru.

Also worth mentioning are Cibo Matto, an all-female duo made up of Yuka Honda and Miho Hatori, who combined trip-hop with Japan's Shibuya-kei scene, the comedy-rock and surreal pop of Frank Zappa, and touches of postmodern avant-garde. Theirs was a brief but intense career at the crossroads of different trends, blending zany humour with stylistic kaleidoscopicity.

The Skylab quartet, on the other hand, brings together well-known British, American and Japanese artists and producers (including Scotsman Howard "Howie B" Bernstein) and takes apart and reassembles trip-hop, IDM, ambient chill-out and avant-garde composition. They are perhaps among the most "underground" acts, but while staying behind the scenes they act as a bridge between electronic and avant-garde scenes.

With chill-out, lounge also comes back into the spotlight — another mood music, specifically the one used in the 50s and 60s to provide background sound for high-traffic spaces (from hotel lobbies to supermarkets), made up of several musical styles with a strong penchant for the exotic, which together conveyed a cheerful, carefree air (a sign of the confidence brought on by the comfort and novelties being enjoyed at the time).

Although in the case of lounge we're dealing with a genuine revival of the golden-age genre of the same name, today's lounge is often identified with chill-out itself due to its marked tendency to be electronic and evocative; in any case, it should be viewed as a phenomenon adjacent to the development of chill-out.

Most of the same artists converge in both musical proposals, and so here we go again: the superb Kruder & Dorfmeister and their distant American relatives Thievery Corporation; then there are producers oriented toward acid-jazz (a variant of jazz flavoured with funk and hip-hop): from Galliano, James Taylor Quartet, Incognito to Jamiroquai, Brand New Heavies, Nicola Conte; or, moving into the 90s, those of nu-jazz (the essence of jazz, amid shards of soul and funk, soaked in electronic swamps by DJs who combine experimentation and improvisation): St. Germain, Jazzanova and Filia Brazilia; before landing on the sonic vivacity, rich in television and film transpositions, of Ursula 1000, and returning to transatlantic sounds with the Latin lounge of Federico Aubele.

But the list of the most successful lounge records must also include "Vertigo" (1999) and "Goodbye Country Hello Nightclub" (2001) by Groove Armada. Perfect for listening to while sitting comfortably at home with company, their records also boast a house production — one of the few — that managed to deliver some genuine trip-hop emotion, as well as putting substance behind the "lounge-aperitivo" trend that was also emerging within the house audience itself. A soft minimalism envelops every song in the batch, in which every now and then some dreamy trip-hop melodic sequence pops up alongside a showy funky nightclub mood. Samples of classics from the 50s onward, hip-hop breaks and the odd scratch round out the picture.

And there's no two without three: chill-out, lounge and easy listening, three little words we're by now used to hearing mentioned together. Indeed, another rediscovery shaken into the refreshing blend of today's chill-out is the so-called easy listening of the past (light music in the colours of early television sets, exuding that convivial feel of the dawning consumer era: vintage melodic pop, American swing, exotica, French chanson, mid-20th-century auteur film scores, orchestral entertainment or piano-bar music of that period) which, just to show how much these musical varieties tend to overlap with one another, was itself one of the genres filtered through the old lounge.

In truth, easy listening (and more generally the whole lounge anthology) came back into fashion after years in the dark, brandished as a winning weapon by the rock of the early 90s in search of a new identity in total independence. What we're talking about here is an almost hidden branch of independent post-rock, which exhumes the most classic lounge from obscurity and reformulates it in a rock key, whose forerunners can be identified in America's Coctails and in Combustible Edison.

But to stay on the theme of "chill-out atmosphere", it's worth looking across the Channel at two bands steered by the English label Too Pure, Stereolab and Pram, who competed with each other release after release. Both outfits, in fact, seem to take shape under the influence of the experimentation of the late Krautrock wave (if nothing else, for the vintage feel tied to the use of old-school synthesizers and keyboards), transformed into that genuine Krautrock-inspired vocation onto which easy-listening melodies are grafted, caught off guard in a lounge stance, for an irresistible cocktail blend never before served.

The game is almost given away. A single note from Pram or Stereolab could give birth, in its entirety, to Air, the wildly successful French duo made up of Jean-Benoit Dunckel and Nicolas Godin, who show real elegance and craft in reviving easy listening. To be true Frenchmen about it, though, the easy listening Air revisit is a distinctly homegrown one (the exotica of Serge Gainsbourg and Bourcharche, the vintage film scores of Francis Lai, and that francophone 60s pop famous the world over).

In the more explicitly house-oriented side of electronic music, a similar and contemporaneous operation is carried out by fellow Parisian Dimitri From Paris, who on "Sacre Bleu" (1996) — another classic that entered the chill-out canon — channels all the Parisian chic of the fabulous 60s into house music blossoming right under the Eiffel Tower.

Because of the peculiar setup of instruments Dunckel and Godin favour, casually pairing 90s technology with old analogue synthesizers — the notorious Moogs and Korgs that hissed through the cosmic 70s — sounds that were already somewhat old-fashioned to begin with take on an unexpected sense of afterwardness, one that doesn't weigh things down but instead floats in a future already played out in the space age. The same electronic paths taken by Air lead into that space age, and here too French names stand out: Jean-Michel Jarre, Jean-Jacques Perrey, along a route where you can glimpse Vangelis before the inevitable crossroads that is Kraftwerk.

Beneath the strobe-lit haze, the retro sounds of "Moon Safari" ('98), Air's debut album, pulse with glamour, yet these implausibly artificial sounds pick up intention through memory, emotion already dreamed of, and a long-lived desire that keeps renewing itself, settling into that future-anteriority to be sought out beneath the pull of an ageless charm shining like a trinket from the Belle Epoque: beautiful, and dated. What Air scatter across "Moon Safari" aren't cosmic nebulae but shards of space, which, out of respect for easy listening, veer off into electro-pop.

Electro-pop — heresy for two fresh-faced composers moving within that indie scene which, in the 90s, aspired to regenerate genuine music, sickened by the overdoses of synthetic disguise of the 80s, and which had accordingly banished electro-pop, declared infected with patronage and careless of good form. Electro-pop: a vanilla-scented, candied romanticism permeates the thousand feminine facets of "Moon Safari", where femininity — to avoid misleading readings — stands for the heavenly body, "La femme d'argent", which has forever dotted our dreams: the moon. Under this silvery light, "Moon Safari" brings together three dimensions that will make its fortune — pop, love and dream — dusting them just enough with icing sugar before sending them back out into space with imagination. A none-too-advanced space, mind you, compared to the one explored on the Orb's intergalactic adventures — not too serious or demanding to track down, and with nothing to do with the cosmic, Pink Floyd-ish echoes or the whole array of krautrock and kosmische sagas: in short, that blue layer admired while lying back on a young summer's night spent on the beach in sweet company ("Kelly, watch the stars!").

In "Moon Safari" there vibrates a free, wide-open space, decked out with the trendiest labels stamping teenage life — neologisms, gestures, rituals and objects that have become icons, indispensable symbols, coloured confidently in the basic tones of the colour wheel... a headfirst dive into a tube of Smarties, and if there's hesitation, it's the experience itself that's missing, the one being tasted right now — the outlines will then blur, just as the colours start to dull, reflecting the bluish glow of Wood's black lights or of moonlight ("Remember"). The panels of a comic book left open on the bed while you go answer a ringing phone lead us back into that already-mentioned micro-space, populated by likeable, friendly characters who surely must mean something, even if, placed there, they seem a bit obscure — like the famous gorilla wearing a T-shirt reading "I Love Moon" in the video for the cosmonautical, sensuous "Sexy Boy". The vocoder duetting with the analogue space instruments makes it clear we're in a time even more remote than the one we think we're in, and it entices us to stay without asking questions, and to enjoy fleeting emotions and small lunar sensations.

The free spirit and naive charm of the Beach Boys make up the element Air share, alongside their use of the vocoder, with the other French duo who overturned the rules of disco music in the late 90s: Daft Punk.

Far more in tune with "The Virgin Suicides" (2000) than with "Moon Safari", "10000 Hz Legend" (2001) leans into avant-garde electronics, with Air, modestly enough, playing at being the pocket-sized Kraftwerk of the moment ("Electronic Performers"); they refresh the manner of radio-friendly French pop ("How Does It Make You Feel?"); they keep a dancefloor sex appeal, calling on the grace of Buffalo Daughter for the space chill of "Lucky And Unhappy" and "Sex Born Poison"; and they close with a run of songs that prove a triple-strength concentrate. Through "Wonder Milky Bitch", "Don't Be Light" and "Caramel Prisoner", the western resurrected by the most memorable film scores crosses paths with Kraftwerk riding a certain locomotive, encountered by chance in a half-scattered oasis among the sand dunes, before setting course for a space station where Pink Floyd are laid over.

Many don't warm to this reworking of the sound, and it's hard to take a firm stance in this muddled debate. Compared to "Moon Safari", "10 000 Hz Legend" tells almost a different story, one that came to a quick close, given that on their next release — "Talkie Walkie" (2004) — Air chose to satisfy the tastes and expectations of the majority of their fans instead.

So as not to lose the thread of our discussion, we'll leave that debate for a more fitting occasion, and simply invite Air devotees to carefully put "Moon Safari" back on the shelf once they've given "10000 Hz Legend" a spin, and to set aside any lunar-safari nostalgia, recalibrating themselves to a different sound with different priorities and different aims — though still not far from the moon, since it's always adrift somewhere out in space. And if that nostalgia should persist, you might as well change records and go back to the more trustworthy, more desirous, and much-mentioned "Moon Safari".

So many little frames which, pieced together, show that it was precisely among the French — endowed with a cultural openness that folds back on itself just like the francophone intonation itself, capable of passing off even the lowest vulgarity as bon ton, in a grey, bigoted capital city that needs to shake off at least two centuries' worth of dust before it can call itself cutting-edge — that a shaft of light broke through and produced, in reflection, exceptions running counter to this drift toward monotonous emptiness. Thanks to flesh-and-blood exceptions touched by rare inspiration in those parts (Laurent Garnier and his whole lineage), France, after thirty years of musical dormancy, woke up at the turn of the millennium in an almost entirely Parisian dawn and soaked the music of the late 90s in its spirit, offering up dance innovations that set the trend.

All the various strands in which this new French dance fashion developed put on display, for the whole planet to see, one shared magical quality, nicknamed the french touch. The secret of the formula lies behind an approach to electronic music carried out in the most personal way possible, stitching in other, quite distinct musical genres too — the most unlikely, outdated ones — and finally behind the packaging of it all into a shiny, appealing parcel, properly signed, aimed at a pop market rather than an elitist one.

Every unmistakable signature attached to a record often expresses a style, launches a trend that, through its followers, sends the record spinning around the world. Within this French dance awakening there exists a softer strand of the french touch capable of making you feel pain and pleasure at once, brushing against the most sensitive points of human perception. This strand was shaped in no small part by artists who, for the most part, reinterpret easy listening — starting with Air and Dimitri From Paris, to whose names Kid Loco is often appended.

Kid Loco, the alias of Jean-Yves Prieur, arrived at electronic sounds after cutting his teeth very young in punk bands and working on hip-hop and reggae productions with the band Mega Reefer Scratch. Perhaps the Parisian artist who tried hardest to stay independent, with "A Grand Love Story" (1997) he delivers a veritable manual on the art of seduction and courtship, wrapped up in an assortment of sexy, teasing backdrops, like the voice of Katrina Mitchell of Pastels on "Love Me Sweet" itself. Summer scenes, Mediterranean landscapes ("Relaxin' With Cherry") are pressed into a sonic film reel thanks to a warm ambient energy, tempered by a spiritual touch that winds its way within earthly bounds. "A Grand Love Story" indeed heads straight for the heart of earthly desires: amid a thousand dreamlike fragrances it whispers fantasies ("She Wolf Day Dreaming") and romantic dedications ("She Is My Lover"). But what's most striking about Kid Loco on this occasion is his skill at pairing breezy pop songs with that bluesy trip-hop groove, which makes "A Grand Love Story" a fine, still-relevant chill-out record, packed with distinctive touches without ever growing repetitive.

And so, in 1998, trip-hop takes another turn down a different road.

“Mezzanine” by Massive Attack manages, unlike its predecessors, to be fully nocturnal, with no trace whatsoever of its original reggae shadow. Dub still lingers, but it now craves gloomy sensations and dark moods, drawing from the shadowy recesses of darkwave. The electronic foundation, now thoroughly unfit for dancing, thins out until it becomes little more than a backdrop for traditional rock instruments: bass, drums and guitar (deliberately dissonant, in the authentic manner of the finest 80s dark-rock) that make themselves heard within this dimension suspended in nocturnal darkness. Between the instrumental passages come the beats, more stretched-out than usual, marking at times the urban tension lurking in modern life, at times the dreamlike enchantment found along a sensual path of shimmering voices: Andy Horace's on "Angel" and "The Man Next Door", and Elizabeth Fraser's on "Teardrop" and "Black Milk".

As if by magic, "Teardrop" arrives to slow the taut thread of tension running through the record, and with an angelic Liz Fraser (so coveted that she was drawn into the project) whispering just above a breath over a pulse that mimics falling drops of water, it creates a kind of dreamlike suspension within the album - to be read both as a contemplative moment and as the masterpiece track of "Mezzanine". In "Teardrop", dub and dream-pop, offspring of that same 80s so dearly sought after by Massive Attack, bind together perfectly. But there's more: "Teardrop" brings out the melody that would make Massive Attack popular even with the mainstream audience, the band's most hummable tune, the one that, one way or another, pretty much everyone has come across even indirectly.

“100th Window” arrives in 2003 to complete the climb toward a purely nocturnal sound that "Mezzanine" had set in motion. Following the departures of Mushroom and Daddy G, each for different reasons (artistic differences, fatherhood), Robert 3D was left as the sole embodiment of the prestigious Bristol brand, and he is now free to fully translate, without constraint, his musical sensibility - always the darkest of the three that defined the group's history. That dark, undefined, mournful attitude that prevailed during the recording of "Mezzanine" carries through all the way here, sealing the fate of Massive Attack's sound on their fourth record. With "100th Window", the deep night hinted at in "Mezzanine" finally falls.

Gone are the bright, timbral flourishes of reggae and hip-hop, just as the dance element seems to have vanished entirely into thin air. Dub reigns instead, still coated in so-called white electronica, in darkwave, and within an embalmed rhythm it seems to gallop (or trot) imperceptibly toward darkness ("A Prayer For England", "Special Cases"), guiding the listener along a path that isn't always easy-going, thought out in every facet and thus less immediately accessible, but no less engrossing for it - quite the opposite: the atmospheres captured here are the deepest Massive Attack have ever reached. After all, as the title suggests, "100th Window" plunges into that unknown, untouched world that is our unconscious and represents it, loading up long, slow songs, each graced with valuable performances (3D himself on "Future Proof", Horace Andy on "Everywhen", Sinead O'Connor on "What Your Soul Sings"), with psychedelic brushstrokes laid down by Robert 3D's own hand within his dark microcosm ("Butterfly Caught"), or else interrupting the steady rhythmic and melodic weave with sudden shifts in sonic register, almost always built up toward a rising climax ("Name Taken").

Picking up the legacy of the most sensational trip-hop of the 90s, giving it a fresh coat and blending it into "Felt Mountain", Goldfrapp arrive on the threshold of the new millennium - another eclectic Bristol duo, made up of Will Gregory, a film-score composer, and Alison Goldfrapp, who as a session vocalist had already passed plenty of auditions, having featured on Orbital's "Snivilisation" ('94) and on Tricky's "Maxiquaye".

Goldfrapp don't pick up that slow, decelerated pulse, but instead rework the most precious things Bristol's art scene has offered so far: the cinematic style of Portishead and, by extension, that fondness for the music of Ennio Morricone and John Barry and its noir tonalities, the use of dreamlike settings once conjured up by the Cocteau Twins, the icy vocal inflection of Bjork - and they tie all of it back to classic German fairy-tale music (Wagner, Strauss and Bach).

The result ranges from trip-hop in its most classic sense to a kind of "neo-dream-pop" resting on "ambient electronics", drawing on classical instrumentation to create an enchanted ambient effect - hence the pairing of piano and violins with electronic loops. And then there's Alison Goldfrapp's voice, shifting à-la Bjork, yet casting a spell à-la Nancy Sinatra, seemingly determined, almost on a whim, to capture the listener at all costs and lead them far off along the cobbled paths of a dense, surreal forest, where "Lovely Head", "Human", "Utopia" and all the other songs on "Felt Mountain" come to life. Alison herself, through the photos in the CD booklet, takes on the guise of a small, mysterious nymph hiding away with other unknown creatures in the forest, gifted with the power to enchant visitors through her soft, intoxicating, elusive singing.

"Felt Mountain" confirms itself as yet another "made in Bristol" gem that managed to bring something new to the homegrown sound, right when it seemed to have reached the twilight of its evolution. After such a brilliant debut, both critics and the newly won-over fans were left disappointed by Goldfrapp's subsequent releases ("Black Cherry", '03, partly redeemed by tracks like "Deep Honey" and "Hairy Trees", which still breathe traces of that unreachable beauty first glimpsed at the start; "Supernature", '05), which plunged into the most commercial strain of electro-pop/electro-clash, leaving behind a once-lavish artistic experimentation.

In 2008, with "Seventh Tree", Goldfrapp surprisingly retraced their earliest steps. Without disowning their electro chapter, "Seventh Tree" faintly echoes "Felt Mountain", which nonetheless remains unmatched in terms of pure atmosphere. Goldfrapp dust off the dream-pop they had set aside after converting to electro-pop sounds, and Alison, who had in the meantime stopped playing the glitter-and-glamour femme fatale of "Black Cherry" and "Supernature", goes back to singing softly amid the murmur of nature, conjuring idyllic, delicate atmospheres, this time, it seems, in altogether human form. Her voice does indeed fill the air, as free and gorgeous as in the old days, but gone is that romantic austerity that once made her divine among wooded mountain heights: instead she appears cheerful and smiling, with the face of the girl next door, seemingly offering up, in friendly fashion, the best recipes for happiness, romping through a flowering meadow between a song that could well be called "Happiness" and an even more playful one titled "Caravan Girl". A few electro touches remain, sprinkled here and there, syrupy with folk motifs ("Clowns", "Eat Yourself") and sixties flourishes ("Little Bird"), in a tiny, rediscovered Eden.

A return that's certainly comforting for fans of the earliest Goldfrapp, but one that feels somewhat artificial in its attempt to resurrect a dream-pop that is no longer what it once was, being "more pop than dream", and paradoxical too, if you look at the record's more lightweight sides, such as some unspoken concessions to a very radio-friendly refrain - and which therefore lacks the spirit and clarity that "Felt Mountain" managed to deliver.

Meanwhile, promising new acts poised between nostalgia and a leap into the future begin to emerge on the horizon. Such is the case with Stateless, who with their self-titled album laid the groundwork for a refounding of trip-hop amid lush soundscapes.

But 2008 is also the year of another masterful comeback, one still identifiable with a logo stamped on an ever-more-pared-down aquamarine sleeve, P., and right on cue - albeit after an 11-year wait since the second, self-titled album - that P. stands for Portishead. Portishead's third work bears the evasive title "Third", and already in that title we recognize Portishead's well-known tendency to leave things unsaid whenever asked for comment or definition.

In defiance of the habits and customs of today's record industry, Portishead try again: they set out to extract a new sound, distinct, well-diluted, one that slips past easy comprehension on first listen and burrows into the intellectual depths of a long-meditated production. It descends into an acoustic minimalism that leaves constantly muted the downbeat patterns Portishead started out with - stripped of that dreamy pop magic and stretched over bleak, despairing backdrops - favouring instead electronics, guitar that's by turns grating and gently folk-tinged, together with insistent percussion, over the fervour of "Bristol hip-hop", and thereby steering clear of all its usual devices: scratching, sampling, extended pauses.

The folk spirit marked out by Utley's acoustic guitar, seemingly a legacy of "Out Of Season", Beth Gibbons' solo album recorded with Paul Webb (former guitarist of Talk Talk), emerges unmistakably in "Deep Water", or else pokes through electronic tolling in "Hunter" and "Nylon Smile". Beth's voice, livid and stretched to the very limit of its range, digs even deeper into an anguished melancholy that traces, like a shadow cast on a wall, the figure of a defenceless human being locked in constant struggle against oppression.

Just as happened lately with Massive Attack, Portishead too seem to have shifted toward a darkwave landscape - rawer, streaked with icy patches of Nordic electronica ("Threads", "Small") that at its most extreme borrows heavily from Kraftwerk-style techno ("We Carry On"), even taking on, for the occasion, strong industrial leanings ("Machine Gun"). Still, some tracks retain that sense of travelling music through their alternation of emptiness and fullness ("Plastic" and "Magic Doors"), or through those electronic expanses ("The Rip") that, even as they soften into a Teutonic tone, confirm that this is still, after all, trip-hop - only enriched with the updates it duly deserved.

To close out our journey through 2008, we come to another inevitable Bristol icon, Tricky, who with "Knowle West Boy" announces not just his umpteenth comeback, but also a return to the places where he grew up and which, as we might conclude, shaped his musical formation. It's an album, then, conceived as a re-proposal of the sound of "Maxinquaye" — and many would like to see it that way, if it weren't for the fact that with every Tricky release, people always expect a return to "Maxinquaye".

With "Knowle West Boy" in hand, if we go fishing for trip-hop in its universally understood, early sense, only two songs really come up trumps: "Joseph" and "Past Mistake", not by chance the most captivating, able to capture our imagination in an instant and make us dream again of fragments of Bristol's past. The other tracks arrive as something else entirely: a layering of reggae and dub ("Bacative"), visceral rap ("Coalition"), Santana-esque Latin rock ("C'mon Baby"), electrofunk

("Council Estate"), urban brit-pop ("Far Away"), in which the standout element is often the daring vocal performance of Veronika (Veronica Coassolo), yet another of Tricky's chosen muses, Italy's second pick.

To these, however, are applied the same devices on which Tricky's entire discography is based: cushioning the innate character of various musical genres in order to fry them together, adding an incandescent pathos as the binding ingredient. And this is often — as his first run of albums demonstrates — a warm, angry suffering that burns along the edge of the notes. There's no shortage of rationality and care in how dissimilar materials are selected and woven together. It's a method that has proven over time to be Tricky's ace up his sleeve, lifting his music to greater heights, but also a slippery, calculated means by which he has tried to win over just about everyone's sympathies.

A champion of ethno-musical contamination, one of the first to promote the fusion of rock, electronics and hip-hop (which is said to have set an example for his former bandmates, alluding to "Mezzanine" as a reaction to "Maxinquaye"), a great formula suited to the needs of MTV and its imitators, Tricky has dared everything: digging out blues sensations within an increasingly dark and disturbed dub on "Pre-Millenium Tension" and "Angels With Dirty Faces"; then transplanting the Bristol sound to New York, disguising it in the shape and colors of American hip-hop on "Juxpose"; sliding, flat and creatively spent, into the mainstream alongside media stars (from Anthony Kiedis and John Frusciante to Flea of Red Hot Chili Peppers, from Cyndi Lauper to Alanis Morissette and Ed Kowalczyk) on "Blowback"; and finally returning to sunnier, more surface-level territory, flanked by a new muse, Italy's Costanza Francavilla, capable of lending a hushed voice to some of the shadowy undertones Tricky still harbored; over time he's let the slow beat slip away, chasing more sonorous, livelier rhythms in safer, less aggressive and less dark arrangements — but also less compelling ones.

"Knowle West Boy" seems to arrive in 2008 not so much to catch up with "Maxinquaye", but rather to sum up more than ten years of musical activity, colorful in every sense, whose roots sink directly into Bristol soil. Inside it, Tricky has packed everything he had left to say about his music: every track captures a phase, a style, complete with its flaws and virtues. If the 2008 resurgence of trip-hop makes "Knowle West Boy" feel epochal, it's not so much as a return to the past, but as a celebration of a musical genre that marked a generation, influenced music culture, and which over time has dissolved right into that very culture. And the same could be said of Portishead's "Third"...

From the advancing wave that calms troubled waters, to the northern storm of contrasts in harmony that crashes against the nuances of a lighter listenability. In its progression, the Bristol hypnosis made sound is by now something that lingers in the air and could come find you at any moment. But above all, it's a dense emotional trace held within a slow pulse that keeps sounding across the distance from a far-off origin, because — for anyone who hasn't noticed yet — that Bristol sound has already become legend.

Additional contributions by Alessandro Mattedi (Archive, Bowery Electric, Cibo Matto, Red Snapper, Skylab)

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20/02/2026