Herb Sundays 153: Downtempo (chosen by Michael Cina)
The enduring charm of the breakbeat, lean back and rewind. The wayback sound of now.
Herb Sundays 153: Downtempo (chosen by Michael Cina)
art by .
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I’m not sure what connects this moment to the 90s exactly. Maybe it’s atmosphere. Maybe it’s the start of a new era. Maybe we’re just craving more space in our music the way we crave it in our lives. But whatever it is, it feels like a soundtrack to now. A mellow and slow, deliberate mood that we haven’t named yet, and maybe one we don’t need to. - MC for Herb Sundays
A romantic globalist rush - intro by SV4
The term Downtempo has always been used more as a catch-all than a genre, a rough signifier that either elicits ‘90s nostalgia or something vaguely dim. Because of this, Downtempo has never been a terribly fashionable term to claim, compared to the cooler genre buddies that it sits alongside, and even when out of vogue, it doesn’t take up much space in the closet. But with enough distance from its commercial heights (much like Trance, which we covered in these pages), the appeal is resonant again.
For our purposes, we’ll use Downtempo to include the genres of Trip-Hop, with edges of chunky Ambient, mottled IDM, obtuse Bleep, Cool Britannia Indie and its Big Beat remixes, Drum & Bass, Chill-Out (and its wayfaring cousin, Balearic) and Instrumental Hip-Hop. Some consider the train line to continue through Chillwave and Lo-Fi Hip-Hop, but the playlist Cina made hews to the previous sentence.
At its peak, Downtempo, including the cultural inputs of Bay Area-bred Indie Hip-Hop and Turntablism (from which DJ Shadow arrived, midwifed by James Lavelle and Mo’ Wax, see Rob Sevier (of Numero Group) Mo’ Wax playlist below, for further Jazz Fudge) and a more celebrated DJ culture (Turntables are outselling guitars!), had not only infiltrated the new spread of boutique hotel lobbies and restaurants as an audio shorthand for a jetset luxury but even the gamut of pop (bands like Sugar Ray, Incubus and Limp Biskit had in-band DJs) and some of tastiest hits of Fin-de-Siècle/Y2K pop, including The Verve’s “Bittersweet Symphony” or the sly the Can-Pop of Len’s “Steal My Sunshine” (built around an Andrea True Connection loop), as suuch there’s always been a slight derision of the space, seen as unintellectual or “coffee table” compared to its more political genre peers.
In Search of James Lavelle: A Herb Sundays Mo' Wax Sunday Edition
“There is a sharp intelligence that he hides behind the slang and jargon of the perpetual teenager. And he turned being a perpetual teenager into a successful career. Lavelle did everything. He was a DJ, scene-leader, producer, record company executive–but primarily, an effortless networker whose connections spread across the world. He got to know the B…
The CD mix-era was the mechanism which allowed Downtempo to globe to really hit. EasyJet Techno was around the corner, but for now, you could have the sound of a (maybe) chic Parisian bar at home thanks to myriad compilations. The biggest and best, especially Kruder & Dorfmeister’s The K&D Sessions (which just made it to Apple Music, bless), provided a venn diagram of Rap, Electronic, and mother of us all, Dub.
Then all of a sudden the sound flipped. Maybe it was increasing sample fees or the move of Hip-Hop production moving into a more processed sound in The Neptunes/Timbaland era, which promoted new songs from synths like the Korg Triton over the reliable MPC and its chopped loops. Or maybe it had all gone too far, the world-conquering bric-a-brac of Moby’s Play (1999) was impossible to escape for years, and so, the sound was rinsed.
While critics shed most of these albums from their lists apart from a few (Tricky, who made my fave debut LP of the era, DJ Shadow, and Portishead seemed to hold on), the influence remained somewhere in the groundwater. I snapped the above pic of the whiteboard at the famed Other Music shop, co-helmed by my friend and colleague Josh Madell and staffed by some of the best minds in music (too many to name here). The most arguably snobby (in a good way) shop in the world, was a peak distributor of the stuff, making its way into many thousands of homes and into the CD changers at all knowing local bar/restaurant/cafés in the pre-digital era. In its final months of business in Soho in 2016, they revealed time top sellers list, where 3 of the top 5 alone form a hydra of slow supremacy: Air, Boards Of Canada (listen again, it’s not IDM), and K&D, nestled up snug in their orange and blue bags, sold handily like Beta Band (also Trip-Hop) discs in the film adaptation of
’s (Herb 115) High Fidelity (2000).Now with Air and Kruder & Dorfmeister embarking on world conquering tours, the Adam Curtis’d paranoia of Massive Attack and Burial on high alert, and with enough distance from the soupier source to see its charm, the downtempo influence can be felt again, safely. 2023 alone boasted crushed’s extra life ep, Tornado Wallace’s a.s.o. project, and James K’s Scorpio EP, three variants on the dusty fire & ice template of big beats and sultry vox (all three appear in Cina’s playlist), and then bands like Chanel Beads and untitled (halo) helping form a shoegazier take on the zeitgeist. Beatport recently launched their Downtempo page, and perhaps the indicator of note is perhaps this years’s DJ-Kicks mix from Logic1000 (aka
, who writes an amazing Substack, ) is a phenomenal mix, seconded by .While the UK tradition of “chillout” starts a long time before with the KLF (A Herb Favorite) and offshore suppliers including Ibizan magician DJs including DJ Alfredo, who passed away last year. America got the memo late, even though the source ingredients were more than handy. In many ways Downtempo was an invitation to a romantic but rugged music that Americans could never have concocted solely on our own. A sonic globalism where Indie kids, stoners, Hip-Hoppers, and comedown ravers all had a piece of the action, tourists and purists alike. For Americans, we of course we had to import the sound from the distant shores of Bristol, Vienna, Tokyo, or Paris, to allow ourselves the change to get supine, or maybe relinquish all. - SV4
Downtempo, chosen and written by
“What is it? I never heard any music like this in my life before and if I ever have, I don’t know where I heard it.” - End of “Little Fluffy Clouds”, The Orb
The beginning of downtempo came to me through the cracks, late at night, from the hum of a portable radio past my bedtime. I listened, twelve years old in Texas, with one plastic earpiece barely held together, snuck under my pillow so my parents wouldn’t know I was still awake. I didn’t know exactly what I was hearing or how it would change my life. In the early 80s, 83 to be exact, I’d stay up late to check out Dr. Demento who was a DJ that would play odd outsider and funny music of all forms. After his show ended, there was a shift in the airwaves where a new kind of music came on with a slower tempo and breaks it felt R.A.W, playful, and lyric based. I remember hearing artists like UTFO, Curtis Blow, Grandmaster Flash, and eventually the Fatboys. I could sense that things were shifting. From electro into something looser, more expressive. I was watching it evolve rapidly in real time. The Roxanne Shante battles were mythical. Everything about hip-hop it felt immediate, like being inside a culture that was inventing itself on the fly but still distant, from another planet.
In 1986, I moved to Kansas City and lost access to the radio show, but the music kept finding me, through friends, college radio, and record stores. I watched the rise of Run-DMC, LL Rocking the bells, the nihilistic energy of the Beastie Boys connected the musical dots. I still remember when one of my punk friends came back from Europe in ’89 with a Soul II Soul cassette and played it for me, she said it was massive over there and I bought the record the very next day. It changed something in both of us. The low BPM, the soulful lean, it just clicked and spoke to me, like when I heard Inner City the very same year. It seems like the UK had this ability to see, understand and contextualize music, like northern soul and house, and then elevate it to another level. The UK music scene was busy cross pollinating genres and forming acid jazz and what would eventually morph into “downtempo.”
I moved back to Texas in 1990 for college and DJed House music by night but I also collected anything slower, more textured, and beat-driven like the Orb or on Ninja Tune and Mo Wax. There was a parallel line between Downtempo and house music. For instance, NYC musicians like Todd Terry and Pal Joey were using all the tools of hip-hop to make their version of house music with some of the hardest breaks ever recorded. More than a few labels like Eightball and Nervous would put out deep and slower breaks and hip-hop. I joined a record pool and stumbled onto Massive Attack’s “Unfinished Sympathy.” That single felt like a portal and brought some magical memories like playing it to a thousand+ people in an abandoned TX warehouse, everyone loosing their minds. In ‘93 I got to see DJ Smash (Jazz not Jazz) play in a dusty cement room in NYC. Then in ‘94 I heard Smith & Mighty, Portishead… but when Kruder & Dorfmeister’s G-Stoned landed… that EP became a blueprint and cemented the foundation.
That era shaped more than my taste. It shaped how I worked, how I thought, how I saw. Music was my life, it was information, it was currency and it became an extension of my design process itself. In 1996, I moved to Minneapolis and started working on my design career. Building websites, experimenting, staying up late staring at screens. Music stayed with me through it all. There was a kind of unspoken but common understanding and alignment of music in design circles back then. That world of Raygun, tDR aesthetics, all those glitchy, expressive layouts, it felt like this music came bundled with the software and every genre of electronic music was all part of the same app. By the time Moon Safari came out in ’98, it felt like Air had completed this universe.
In the 90s I also started reading UK magazines like Straight No Chaser designed by Ian ‘SWIFTY’ Swift. That opened even more doors. Through it, I connected to Tyler Askew & eventually Karl Injex in Atlanta, who became musical guides and friends. They helped show me how deep the rabbit hole of the global sound could go. They also connected the present to the past in a way that gave it all weighted perspective, in typical UK style.
If I had to define downtempo, I’d say it’s an “imaginary genre” (sometimes called “trip-hop” but I always felt that term was corny) of low BPM music, built on jazz, hip-hop, soul and breakbeats. It’s DNA is found in many different forms of music. It’s rough and smooth. It feels lived-in but unfamiliar. It gives you space but it’s not background music. It’s music that surrounds you, something you live inside of. True ambient. It stays with you while you work, while you think, walk, while you come apart and rebuild. Downtempo feels like memory and motion at the same time. For me, it’s music for dreaming and designing. It’s been the inseparable background hum of my creative life.
When Sam asked me to make a downtempo mix, I was excited but understood what he was pointing to. In the last few years, we’ve noticed its return. Not as nostalgic or pastiche, but something alive again. Textured breakbeats, ambient shoegazed vocals, slowed rhythms, they’re reappearing in new shapes. Artists like James K, Maara, etc. are all pulling it forward but most of it doesn’t feel like a revival from the past. It feels like the youth invented it again for themselves. That’s what makes it relevant and alive. This mix is large and meant to be played on shuffle. I narrowed this down from over 200 tracks to this, it was difficult to find the frame, not cliché while also giving some standards.
I’m not sure what connects this moment to the 90s exactly. Maybe it’s atmosphere. Maybe it’s the start of a new era. Maybe we’re just craving more space in our music the way we crave it in our lives. But whatever it is, it feels like a soundtrack to now. A mellow and slow, deliberate mood that we haven’t named yet, and maybe one we don’t need to. -
Bonus Beats (ambient breaks dub)
RIP Horst Weidenmueller, who we lost earlier this year, a lot of this post is owed to him and his influence.
- launched their playlist feature in beta so I took it for a spin, and pulled some contempo downtempo cuts from my library, bringing your total dose to 14 hours this week.
With a pleasing thud, a
digest hits your stoop.
LOVE (and thank you:), I had many of these in one of my black nylon zip-around CD cases...Kruder + Dorfmeister/Depeche Mode "Useless" is still one of my faves...
Herb always killer, but this week is so my shit. Cina with way more than just design chops, somebody give this guy a show on NTS