Review
Genre and Mood
Nightmares On Wax’s Les Nuits is downtempo at its most generous: trip-hop and nu-jazz played by an orchestra. The mood is dreamy and relaxed, soulful rather than sleepy, music for a late night that does not want to end.
Song Summary
Les Nuits opens Carboot Soul, George Evelyn’s third album as Nightmares On Wax, released by Warp on 12 April 1999, and one of its two singles that year. It is the end of a long chase. In 1987 or 1988 Evelyn found Quincy Jones’s instrumental version of Summer in the City and wanted to sample it, but his Casio keyboard held only 1.6 seconds of sound and he could never get the full two bars. With his first sampler he chopped it into Nights Interlude in 1991; Nights Introlude followed on Smokers Delight; and Les Nuits, Wikipedia says, was built on a full orchestral, live recording session inspired by those samples, which Evelyn mixed himself.
Musical Breakdown
No source describes the track section by section, so this breakdown keeps to what the sources hear in it.
The Orchestra
The strings are the song. Arctic Reviews counts a fifty-two piece orchestra, “a giant leap from grappling with the DIY sound systems of his youth”.
The Groove
Under them sits what the same writer called “a liquid, organic funk”, as fit for going out as for staying in.
The Video Edit
The official video, on the label’s VEVO channel, runs about three and a half minutes against the album’s 6:20; a separate radio edit exists. What the edit removes, no source says.
Concepts in Focus
sampling is usually the act of lifting a recording. Les Nuits shows its other side: a sample can be a sketch. Evelyn’s loop from Summer in the City became a theme an orchestra could play, and the borrowing turned, in Arctic Reviews’ word, discreet.
Les Nuits is also an alternate version of its own past, the third take on one idea after Nights Interlude and Nights Introlude, and in 2024 the 25th-anniversary edition added a fourth, a Hip Hop Reprise.
A radio edit shortens a track for broadcast. Here the six-minute album opener became a clip under four minutes; listen to both and notice what a short edit can afford to keep.
Artistic Context
Evelyn named the album after car boot sales: he dug for records there, sampled them, then took his mixes back to the car to check them. Tinnitist heard the record as trip-hop “as played by Quincy Jones”, a full band added to the loops, and summed it up: “If you dig the notion of Curtis Mayfield getting down with Portishead, Carboot Soul packs a trunkful of funk.”
Impact and Reception
AllMusic, as quoted by Wikipedia, called the album “one of the best arguments yet for the continuing development of trip-hop beyond mere coffee table fare”, and Arctic Reviews placed Les Nuits at number 46 of its hundred greatest songs of the 1990s. Start with the full album version, and give the strings their six minutes.
