Big Beat

Having its heyday in the 1990s, British music press and industry used this term to describe an electronic music subgenre focusing on sound and groove: heavy, compressed, filtered and distorted breakbeats combined with acid house’s TB-303 and loops from 1960s and 1970s records, later also rock guitar and organ loops as well as punk rock-style vocals.

DJs-turned-artists duo The Chemical Brothers can be regarded as founders of this genre, having eclectically mixed soul, funk and techno during their time as resident djs at »The Heavenly Social« in London mid-1990s. They also were regular guests at »Big Beat Boutique«, a club night at Brighton’s »Concorde« co-hosted by Norman Cook aka Fatboy Slim which can be seen as a playground for further development of this genre. Big Beat had notable mainstream success in the 1990s. Artists like the aforementioned Chemical Brothers and Fatboy Slim, The Prodigy or Propellerheads with their James Bond-esque sound achieved high notations in charts worldwide. Big Beat was frequently used in film scores and commercials and also fostered the acceptance of electronic music in the US through artists like The Crystal Method and BT.