boom bap
Boom bap is an onomatopoeic name: boom is the kick drum, bap the snare that cracks on the second and fourth beats. It describes a style of hip hop production built on punchy, often slightly distorted sampled drums and short loops taken from old records, with little else in the arrangement. The phrase is usually […]
bossa nova
Bossa nova, roughly new trend in Portuguese, took shape in Rio de Janeiro at the end of the 1950s. Its heart is a quiet, syncopated guitar pattern developed by João Gilberto, who condensed the rhythms of samba onto the nylon-string guitar, beneath soft, understated singing and harmonies rich in jazz-like extended chords. Elizeth Cardoso’s album […]
cassette culture
The compact cassette, introduced by Philips in 1963 and first marketed for recording speech, became by the late 1970s the cheapest way to record, copy and share music. Cassette culture is the name for the amateur scene that grew around it: musicians recorded at home on four-track machines from Tascam and Fostex, dubbed their own […]
chillhop
Chillhop blends the words chill and hip hop and is used, often interchangeably with lo-fi hip hop and jazzhop, for laid-back instrumental beats with jazzy chords, gentle drums and warm textures. Where some lo-fi leans towards a hazy, deliberately degraded sound, music sold as chillhop tends to be a little cleaner and brighter, with guitar, […]
chill-out
Chill-out, also written chillout, takes its name from the chill-out rooms of British club culture, quieter spaces where dancers could rest away from the main floor. In 1989 at Heaven, in London, the DJs Jimmy Cauty and Alex Paterson played ambient records in such a room, and in February 1990 Cauty’s group The KLF released […]
chillwave
Chillwave was a short-lived but influential indie style of the late 2000s in the United States. Its songs sounded like half-remembered 1980s pop heard on a worn cassette: vintage synthesisers, filtered drum machines, slowed-down samples, mellow vocals buried in reverb, and lyrics and artwork full of summer and the beach. The name itself began as […]
city pop
City pop is a loose term for a strand of Japanese popular music that flourished from the late 1970s through the 1980s. Record companies and magazines used it for music with an urban, sophisticated feel, influenced by American funk, soft rock, jazz and R&B, and full of jazz-derived chords such as major sevenths. It became […]
cool jazz
Cool jazz emerged in the United States in the late 1940s as a calmer counterpart to bebop. Its players favoured light tones with little or no vibrato, middle registers, careful arrangements and a restrained, understated rhythm section. The tenor saxophonist Lester Young, with his airy sound and relaxed phrasing, is often seen as its forerunner. […]