Downtempo is where beats, dub and jazz slow right down. Deep basslines, dusty samples and plenty of space, made for late nights and long Sunday mornings.
New to it? Start with Dummy. If you want something from this decade, make it Bonobo’s Fragments.
Its roots are in dub. In 1970s Jamaica, Lee “Scratch” Perry treated the mixing desk as an instrument, stripping songs back to bass and drums and drenching the rest in echo. Sound systems carried the idea to Britain, and Adrian Sherwood’s recent reworking of Nightmares on Wax, In A Space Outta Dub, shows the line has never broken.
Bristol is where it came together. Massive Attack grew out of The Wild Bunch, a sound system playing hip-hop, reggae and soul across the city, and their debut Blue Lines slowed it all to a heavy, melancholy crawl. Fellow Wild Bunch member Nellee Hooper went on to produce Björk’s Debut. Portishead followed with Dummy and won the 1995 Mercury Prize. The press called it trip-hop, a label both bands disliked.
It spread fast. In California, DJ Shadow built Endtroducing..... almost entirely from samples. In Leeds, Nightmares on Wax made Smokers Delight for Warp. In Vienna, Kruder & Dorfmeister’s The K&D Sessions turned other people’s songs into slow-motion grooves, and in France, Air’s Moon Safari made it lush and retro. Even Everything But The Girl remade themselves on Walking Wounded after a remix of “Missing” became a worldwide hit.
The Cinematic Orchestra brought live jazz to it on Every Day, Four Tet wove in folk guitars and found sounds, and Bonobo carried it into the 2010s with Black Sands. Sydney’s RÜFÜS DU SOL took its slow-burn moods to festival stages around the world.
It’s still evolving. Maribou State’s Hallucinating Love is warm and hazy, and Tycho’s Infinite Health glows like a long drive at dusk. Every record in our downtempo vinyl collection is a new pressing, made for a good pair of speakers and the lights turned down.
Want it slower and more spacious? Head to Ambient. Want more of a pulse? Try Electronic. Want the jazz and soul it borrowed from? There’s Soul, Funk & Jazz.
