Review
Genre and Mood
Nightmares On Wax open Smokers Delight with Nights Introlude, trip-hop at its most downtempo, the slow end where it shades into chillout: relaxed, dreamy and reflective, a track that asks nothing of the listener except to slow down.
Song Summary
Nights Introlude is the second chapter of a story that began in George Evelyn’s teens. In 1987 or 1988 he found Quincy Jones’s instrumental adaptation of Summer in the City and wanted to loop it, but his Casio keyboard had only 1.6 seconds of sampling time and he could never capture the full two bars. In 1990 he bought an Akai S-950 sampler, and the chopped-up parts became Nights Interlude, the opener of his 1991 debut A Word of Science. In 1995 he reworked the idea as Nights Introlude, the first track of Smokers Delight: an intro that behaves like an interlude.
Musical Breakdown
No source describes Nights Introlude passage by passage, and the video here is about twenty seconds shorter than the 4:40 album track, so this breakdown stays general.
Intro
Derek’s Music Blog wrote that the album’s standing as a trip-hop classic was apparent from the opening bars of this track, which it called four glorious minutes of symphonic and cinematic chill out.
Main Section
The piece rests on its sample. Derek’s Music Blog names Quincy Jones’s Summer in the City as the source; how the loop is cut and layered here, the sources do not describe.
Concepts in Focus
sampling here is a long relationship rather than a single borrowing. Stereogum describes the three versions, Nights Interlude in 1991, Night’s Introlude in 1995 and Les Nuits in 1999, as a decade-spanning triptych; Evelyn himself says that over the next couple of albums he did different renditions, and finally did it with a full string orchestra.
The craft is in the loop. Writing about the 1991 version, Stereogum noted that the source is not drastically cut up or distorted: rearranging the loops turns the original’s slow burn into something more ruminative and meditative. Change comes from arrangement.
An interlude usually sits between songs. Placing one first, as an “introlude”, tells the listener that Smokers Delight is a mood to enter more than a set of songs. Compare Kruder & Dorfmeister – Johnson, made in Vienna the same year from another looped old record.
Artistic Context
Nightmares On Wax is George Evelyn, also known as DJ E.A.S.E., from Leeds, whose records have come out on Warp since his first singles. Smokers Delight came out on 25 September 1995 on Warp in Britain and Wax Trax! in the United States, recorded in Sheffield, Wakefield and Leeds and produced under the name E.A.S.E.
Impact and Reception
Smokers Delight reached number 84 in the UK, was included in 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, and in 2015 Fact placed it fifteenth among the best trip-hop albums of all time. Nights Introlude lived on as a radio edit on the 1999 Les Nuits single and as a seven-minute live version from Chicago on the 2020 reissue. Start the album here, with the lights low.
