Dummy

Dummy is the debut studio album by English electronic music band Portishead, released on 22 August 1994 by Go! Beat Records. The album received critical acclaim and won the 1995 Mercury Music Prize. It is often credited with popularising the trip hop genre, and is frequently cited in lists of the best albums of the 1990s. Dummy was certified triple platinum in the UK in February 2019, and had sold 920,000 copies in the United Kingdom as of September 2020. Worldwide, the album had sold 3.6 million copies by 2008. Background Geoff Barrow and Beth Gibbons met during an Enterprise Allowance course in February 1991. They started recording their first ideas for the songs in Neneh Cherry's kitchen in London while Barrow was hired by her husband Cameron McVey to work on her second album, Homebrew (1992). In Bristol, they recorded at the Coach House Studios. The first song that they finished for the album was "It Could Be Sweet" in 1991. Adrian Utley then met Barrow while they were recording at Coach House Studios, heard their first recorded track "It Could Be Sweet", and started exchanging ideas on music. Barrow taught Utley sampling while Utley introduced the band to unusual sounds such as cimbaloms and theremins, which led to an "amalgamation of ideas".<ref name=guardian>{{cite news |last=Rogers |first=Jude |author-link=Jude Rogers |url=https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/aug/24/portishead-dummy-wasnt-a-chillout-album-25th-anniversary-geoff-barrow-adrian-utley-beth-gibbons |title=Dummy wasn't a chillout album. Portishead had more in common with Nirvana' |newspaper=The Observer |date=24 August 2019}}</ref> According to Barrow, "It was like a light-bulb coming on" when Utley joined them, and they realised they could make their own samples not found on other records, and created one of the most distinctive sounds of the decade. The production of the album uses a number of hip-hop techniques, such as sampling, scratching, and loop-making. The album was not recorded digitally. They sampled music from other records, but they also recorded their own original music, which was then recorded onto vinyl records before manipulating them on record decks to sample. In order to create a vintage sound, Barrow said that they distressed the vinyl records they had recorded by "putting them on the studio floor and walking across them and using them like skateboards", and they also recorded the sound through a broken amplifier.