Trip Hop Exposure Week: Unkle

     Alright so as some of you may know I was planning on doing an educational post about trip hop/downtempo. Well that was extremely hard to do, for one it was a serious bitch to locate original source material, plus have you ever tried to define trip hop? So instead I just decided to do a small post for every day this (work) week, and yes we're now four days in but I've just started raking in album after album of amazing material.

     I started getting interested in trip hop when I stumbled onto A|Fragile|Hope and discovered Saltillo. From there I ran a few (four or five) torrents put together by a now unresponsive blog Secret Music Box, these compilations tempted me to dig a little deeper and since then... well lets say my hard drive is straining.

     But I digress, Unkle, a trip hop classic is today's featured artist. So Unkle or U.N.K.L.E. are a British duo consisting of James Lavelle and Tim Goldsworthy. Formed in 1994 these chaps haven't stopped yet and have produced many an amazing album under legendary producers such as DJ Shadow. But today I'd like to turn your ear to their 1998 album Psyence Fiction.

     Psyence Fiction was their debut studio album, trip hop gold. Just the first song features some 60 odd samples from Massive Attack to Radiohead and back again, and the original American release had fourteen tracks, you do the math. One amazing thing about this album is the variety, with trip hop nothing ever gets stale but with beats ranging from old school hip hop to full orchestral masterpieces that might have come from a movie, this album never fails to dissapoint. So grab it up and stay tuned for more.