Given the tossed-off origins of the time period “trip-hop”—“hip-hop in a flotation tank,” Mixmag’s Andy Pemberton known as it within the 1994 article the place he coined the time period; “temper muzak for the blunted ’n’ paranoid,” Melody Maker’s Simon Reynolds provided a couple of months later—the animating concept has confirmed remarkably resilient. Take a boom-bap beat, paint on a dusky bassline or pitched-down pattern, drape all of it in echo, flip down the dimmer swap. Often—not at all times, however a lot of the time—there’ll be a singer concerned, usually a girl. Generally it’s a voice that feels like lust incarnate; typically like your individual ideas tossing beneath a weighted blanket of the heaviest doubt.
Prior to now three a long time, trip-hop has soundtracked innumerable make-out periods, melted into the wallpaper of numerous fast-fashion dressing rooms, produced some indeniable classics, even minted a celebrity or two. The truth that it’s by no means actually gone away additionally implies that it’s by no means had a correct revival. However there have been stirrings of late, as ’90s digital types like trance and drum’n’bass have re-entered the lexicon. The debut album from a.s.o. looks like trip-hop’s purest expression in years.
The duo’s members—singer Alia Seror-O’Neill, aka Alias Error, and producer Lewie Day, aka Twister Wallace, each Australians primarily based in Berlin—initially related over a mutual love of Kylie Minogue and Madonna, but their music skews a lot darker than these influences. It’s darker even than, say, Avalon Emerson’s debut album or CFCF’s Memoryland, two current forays into digital pop impressed by an analogous assemblage of ’90s touchstones. As Twister Wallace, Day is often identified for a tropical, laid-back sound; in a.s.o., he’s saved the tempos gradual however burned off all of the Balearic affect, leaving simply skeletal drums wreathed in smoke. Spy-movie guitars add noir shading; Center Jap scales snake across the edges; acid synths take tentative swipes within the shadows.
Consistent with its influences—Portishead’s Dummy, Huge Assault’s Safety, Difficult’s Maxinquaye—the temper is sullen and brooding. In “My Child’s Obtained It Out for Me,” the bassline scuffs in opposition to the foundation be aware whereas flashes of dub siren and doppler-effected synths counsel teeming metropolis streets. However a.s.o. aren’t averse to the occasional glint of brightness. The keys of the opening “Go On” are supple and satiny, swollen with tone, and regardless of the downcast vibe, the occasional major-key concord often reveals itself like a half-hidden grin.
