Big beat
They are often punctuated with punk-style vocals or rappers and driven by intense, distorted synthesizer basslines with conventional pop, house and techno song structures.
Big beat tracks have a sound that includes crescendos, builds, drops, extended drum rolls, and sounds such as spoken word samples, dialogues from film and TV, additional instruments such as Middle Eastern strings or sitars, explosions, air horns, sirens (usually police sirens) and gunshots.
Celebrated pioneers of the genre such as Fatboy Slim tend to feature heavily compressed loud breakbeats in their songs, which are used to define the music as much as any melodic hooks and sampled sounds.
Based on the primary use of loud, heavy breakbeats and basslines, big beat shares attributes with jungle and drum and bass, but has a significantly slower tempo.
[14] The band's sound consisted of various experimental musical elements, including heavy drum beats and synthesizer-generated loops as well as an added suggestion of European influences that at times had a trance-like quality.
In the early 1990s, in the midst of several popular musical subcultures, including the English rave scene, British hip hop, chillout or ambient, gestating subgenres such as trip hop and breakbeat, along with the emerging Britpop movement – a process of hybridisation and a taste for eclecticism was developing within English dance music generally.
The Heavenly label's London club The Sunday Social had adopted a similar philosophy with resident DJs the Chemical Brothers and their eclectic approach.
[18] The term caught on, and was subsequently applied to a wide variety of acts, including Bentley Rhythm Ace, Lionrock, the Crystal Method, Lunatic Calm, the Lo Fidelity Allstars, Death in Vegas, and the Propellerheads among others.
[23] The Fat of the Land by the Prodigy sold 2,600,000 copies in the United States[24] and was certified 2× platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).
The platinum-certified soundtrack for The Matrix (1999) featured big beat tracks, selling over 1.4 million copies in the U.S.[35] The genre has also appeared in films such as Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001)[36] and in the Wipeout video game series by Psygnosis.
[41] The genre's most successful acts would further change their sound; more prominently, the Chemical Brothers releasing more material with direct house and techno characteristics (including "4x4" beats which resemble those of house and synthesizer sweeps and noises, marking a departure from their big beat sound consisting of syncopated breakbeats and hip hop samples) inspired by the success of the Gatecrasher club and the trance movement, which would reach a commercial peak between 1999 and 2002.
