Deepdives: The Psychedelic 90s Sound of Triphop, and an Album Breakdown of Good Looking Blues by Laika
by Liv Normandeau (they/them)
My recent deepdive into the world of triphop was sparked by summer boredom and my love of 90s animation and music. More specifically: the incredible soundtrack of MTV's animated show Downtown. The tracks were heavily triphop centric, and the score created by Kimson Albert was full of industrial breakbeats and synth that perfectly matched the grime of the show1. Until this point, I've always been fairly turned off by triphop, seeing it as one of the worst outcomes of the 90s music trends—I don't tend to like electronic music, and I greatly preferred every other genre it borrows from. (And some songs sound creepily like sonic realizations of the visuals of the early Windows operating system and my hazy memories of the public library trips I took as a kid...