Lofi Girl
Lofi Girl is a YouTube channel and record label created in 2015 by Dimitri Somoguy under the name ChilledCow. From February 2017 it broadcast lo-fi hip hop around the clock, and its live stream of beats to relax or study to became one of the defining places where the genre is heard. The channel took […]
lounge music
Lounge music is a loose family of relaxed, sophisticated easy listening associated with cocktail bars, hotel lounges and elegant evenings. The label was mostly applied after the fact: the exotica, space-age pop and light instrumental records of the 1950s and 1960s were not called lounge at the time, but they now form its classic core. […]
downtempo
Downtempo is a broad label for electronic music that keeps a beat but slows it well below club tempos, putting atmosphere, texture and groove ahead of energy. It is close to ambient music but places more weight on rhythm, and it draws freely on hip hop breakbeats, dub, jazz, soul and Brazilian music. Its roots […]
acid jazz
Acid jazz grew out of London’s club scene in the late 1980s, when DJs from the rare groove circuit mixed jazz-funk, soul jazz, Latin records and hip hop beats for dancers. The name, credited to the DJ Gilles Peterson, was a tongue-in-cheek nod to acid house, which was then sweeping Britain. Peterson and Eddie Piller […]
ambient music
Ambient music puts tone, texture and atmosphere ahead of melody, rhythm and song structure. Pieces often unfold slowly through layered synthesisers, sustained drones, gentle repetition and sometimes natural sounds, and they are meant to work both for attentive listening and as part of a room’s background. The term was coined by Brian Eno in the […]
beat tape
A beat tape is a set of instrumentals, usually short and loosely sequenced, that a producer gathers into a single release. The format began as a practical tool: in the 1980s and 1990s producers passed cassettes of beats to rappers and labels as a calling card, and swapping them was part of building a reputation […]
beatmaker
A beatmaker creates the instrumental foundation of a track: drum patterns, bass lines, chords and samples, arranged in a hardware sampler such as an MPC or SP-404 or in a digital audio workstation. In hip hop the word is often used alongside producer. The line between them is loose, but beatmaker stresses the hands-on craft […]
bebop
Bebop, or bop, was the first style of modern jazz. It developed in the early 1940s in New York, notably in after-hours jam sessions at Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem, as young musicians pushed beyond the arranged dance music of the swing big bands. Its leading figures included the alto saxophonist Charlie Parker, the trumpeter Dizzy […]
bedroom pop
Bedroom pop describes songs made by artists alone or with friends in their own rooms, using a laptop, a cheap keyboard and recording software instead of a professional studio. The results are often soft, intimate and slightly rough at the edges, with dreamy guitars, simple drum machines and close, quiet vocals. Home recording has a […]
Blue Note Records
Blue Note Records began on 6 January 1939, when Alfred Lion, a jazz enthusiast who had emigrated from Berlin, recorded the boogie-woogie pianists Albert Ammons and Meade Lux Lewis in a New York studio. His childhood friend Francis Wolff, a photographer, joined him after leaving Germany at the end of that year, and Wolff’s session […]