Sublime was an American reggae/punk/ska band from Long Beach, California, United States. A more detailed look at the band’s stylistic influences reveals a mix of reggae and dub, ska, punk, progressive rock, acoustic rock, hip-hop, and dancehall. The band consisted of three members: Bradley Nowell (vocals and guitar), Bud Gaugh (drums), and Eric Wilson (bass guitar). The band achieved mainstream success with their self-titled third album, but Brad died of a heroin overdose shortly before and the band broke up soon after. The band is still considered influential today, and their music sees heavy airplay on American Alternative radio stations.

From 1988 through the mid 1990s, Sublime toured heavily throughout southern California and garnered a substantial following of surfers and skaters. The band sold their initial recordings at live shows—eventually including their first full-length album 40 Oz. to Freedom. Released on the band’s own Skunk Records, 40 Oz. to Freedom featured several songs that would go on to become fan favorites, including the title track “40 Oz. to Freedom” and “Date Rape”, as well as a selection of covers, including their version of “Smoke Two Joints”, indicating Sublime’s varied influences—The Grateful Dead, KRS-One, The Descendents, Bad Religion, Toots and the Maytals, and Bob Marley. Their second album, Robbin’ the Hood, was recorded in 1994. It consisted of a few fully developed songs along with instrumentals, tape dubs and various rantings of the manic Raleigh Theodore Sakers.

Adrian Thaws (born January 27, 1968), better known as Tricky, is a rapper and musician from England who is important in the trip-hop scene (despite loathing the tag) and remains influential on the british scene more generally.

He is noted for an asthmatic whispering lyrical style that is half-rapped, half-sung. As a producer and a musician he is known for having an aversion to perfection preferring to build up a dark, rich and layered sound. Culturally, Tricky bridges white and black Britain particularly in his fusion of rock and hip-hop, high art and pop culture. He drew his influences from rap (Public Enemy) to post-punk (he covered a Siouxsie and the Banshees’s song Tattoo).

He was in Massive Attack and appeared in the movie The Fifth Element as well as the music video for Parabola by Tool. He has collaborated extensively with other artists on tracks on his various releases, including Bjork, Alanis Morrissette, Cyndi Lauper, Anthony Kiedis, John Frusciante and Flea (of the Red Hot Chili Peppers), Martina Topley-Bird, and Alison Goldfrapp of Goldfrapp also many others.

After his initial success in the latter 1990’s, he started his own label called Durban Poison. Currently he is heading a new imprint called Brown Punk. A new album, titled Knowle West Boy was released in the first half of 2008.

Tricky originally said in an interview with Raygun in October 1996 that he wanted to make an ‘out-an-out punk record’ and that “I thought it was going be heavier. I thought it was just going to be an out-an-out punk record.

US3 is a jazz-rap group founded in London in 1991. They use samples of classic songs released by Blue Note Records. Among them is “Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia)”, sampling Herbie Hancock’s “Cantaloupe Island” on their first album Hand on the Torch. The song received much attention, approaching platinum status in the United States and being adopted as the theme music to the WBUR public radio program The Connection.

Timothy Zachery Mosley (born March 10, 1971 in Norfolk, Virginia) is a Grammy award winning record producer, rapper and singer whose style of production and arranging was very influential in music during the mid-1990s. With partner Magoo, he is a member of the hip hop group Timbaland & Magoo and is the older brother of rapper SebastiAn. He released his debut solo album, Shock Value, in 2007 and then the follow up Shock Value II in 2009. He has produced hit tracks for many artists and has his own record label, Mosley Music Group.

Timbaland is similar to producers such as Norman Whitfield in that he helped to redefine the sound of an entire genre of music with an immediately recognizable production style. The songs he produces feature unusual arrangements, sounds, and instrumentation, tied together by a trademark sense of rhythm. Like Spector and Whitfield, Timbaland’s production sometimes overshadows the credited performer and becomes the actual “star” of the song. With songwriters Steve “Static” Garrett and childhood friend Missy Elliott, Timbaland has helped to create some of the most successful songs in modern pop music and urban music, including singles for Aaliyah, Ginuwine, SWV, Total, and 702.

Mosley grew up in Norfolk, Virginia, where he became acquainted with Missy Elliott and Melvin Barcliff, whose MC name was “Magoo.” Originally a disc jockey known as “DJ Timmy Tim,” Mosely began making hip-hop backing tracks on a Casio keyboard he owned. In 1993 Elliott heard his material and, taken by Mosley’s unique sense of rhythm, immediately began working with him.

Fischerspooner is an electroclash duo and performance troupe formed in 1998 in New York City. The name comes directly from the last names of the band members; Warren Fischer and Casey Spooner.

Spiking extremely retro electropop tendencies (recalling Kraftwerk, early Depeche Mode, and Gary Numan) with a modern approach to programming, Fischerspooner produces a quirky, robotic, and strangely subdued kind of dance music. Their albums can be seen as soundtracks to their stageshows, as opposed to recordings which are performed live.

Many critical theorists have latched on to the band for their subversive attitude and sassy stylings – Judith Butler, Etienne Balibar, and Antonio Negri, to name a few.

Gorillaz are a British virtual band formed in 1998 by a collaboration between Damon Albarn of Britpop band Blur and Jamie Hewlett, co-creator of the comic book Tank Girl. They had the idea to create the band while watching MTV in their London flat and originally intended to call the project Gorilla. The band is comprised of four fictional band members: 2-D (vocals, keyboard), Murdoc Niccals (bass), Noodle (guitar, vocals) and Russel Hobbs (drums). These characters only appear in animated form and are not alter-egos of real people, as is often mistakenly assumed. There is an extensive fictional back-story behind these band members, written by Albarn and Hewlett. The albums, several videos and their autobiographical book Rise Of The Ogre all tell the saga. Damon Albarn is the only permanent musical contributor to the band, which is a collaboration between various musicians. Their style is broad, with a large number of alternative influences including rock, hip-hop and electronica.

They have released three studio albums: Gorillaz (2001), Demon Days (2005) and Plastic Beach (2010). Additionally, they have put out two B-side collections, G-Sides (2001) and D-Sides (2007), and a reggae remix of the Gorillaz album entitled Laika Come Home (2002). The band has also released three DVDs: Phase One: Celebrity Takedown, Demon Days: Live at Manchester Opera House and Phase Two: Slow Boat To Hades.

Xploding Plastix is the musical child of Jens Petter Nilsen and Hallvard Hagen. Both based in Oslo, they started making music together sometime in late ‘98 or early ‘99. After about a year of playing, sampling, programming and focused tune writing; they decided it was time to let the public hear what they’d been up to. This resulted in a 6 track demo in late ‘99. About 22 hours after first shipment, record companies were on the phone, and 4 months later, 5 out of 6 tracks had been released on various labels.

The duos debut album Amateur Girlfriends Go Proskirt Agents was released in 2001 via Norwegian label Beatservice. Subsequently they moved over to Sony and recorded The Doncamatic Singalongs, which was never released outside Scandinavia, despite the announcement of an international release date.

With their momentum taken from underneath them by Sony, Xploding Plastix never acheived their full potential. Though no split has been announced, their website has not been updated since February 2006, when it was announced that the Kronos Quartet sould perform their perform their three movement composition, The Order of Things: Music for the Kronos Quartet.

Xploding Plastix has a very organic sound; throwing saccharine analogue melodies to foreground the acoustic quality; imposing a distinctive live feel. A certain raw edge. An oeuvre of an ear-opener: Zipping and unzipping the beat, a beat-science out-of the ordinary. Emphasizing the flowing warmth and organity of the rhythms. Triggering flailing, skittering, skipping and spinning breaks, makes this pure nightvision!

The Chemical Brothers are a British electronic music duo comprising Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons, who met at the University of Manchester, England in 1992. Initially they called themselves “The Dust Brothers.” They changed their name in 1995 given the preexisting American production duo “The Dust Brothers,” their burgeoning popularity and the threat of legal action from the originals. Thus, their first album as The Chemical Brothers was titled Exit Planet Dust.

Along with The Prodigy, Fatboy Slim, The Crystal Method, Underworld, Orbital, Apollo 440 and a few other less-known acts, they were pioneers at bringing the big beat electronic dance genre to the forefront of pop culture. They are known for their high-quality DJ sets, an example of which can be found on their album Brothers Gonna Work It Out.

Many of their tracks have been in the UK charts as well as those in other countries. Wide belief is that their best album is “Surrender” however “Dig Your Own Hole” is considered their masterwork by a significant number of Chemical Brother connoisseurs and they are known for producing a style which evolves greatly between albums.

Blur is an alternative rock band which formed in Colchester, England in 1989. The band consists of Damon Albarn (vocals, guitar, keyboards), Graham Coxon (guitar, vocals), Alex James (bass) and Dave Rowntree (drums). Blur’s debut album Leisure (1991) incorporated the sounds of Madchester and Shoegazing and spawned their first UK Top 10 single, There’s No Other Way. Following a stylistic change in 1992 (influenced by English guitar groups such as The Kinks, The Beatles, The Animals and XTC) Blur released “Popscene” as a stand alone single, this was a commercial flop, but was widely considered to be a crucial turning point for the band’s style. Following this, Blur released 3 studio albums in a similar style: Modern Life Is Rubbish (1993), Parklife (1994) and The Great Escape (1995). As a result, the band helped to popularise the britpop genre and achieved mass popularity in the UK, aided by a famous chart battle with rival band Oasis dubbed “The Battle of Britpop”.

By the late 1990s, with the release of Blur (1997), the band underwent another reinvention, influenced by the lo-fi style of American indie rock bands such as Pavement; in the process, Blur finally gained mainstream success in the US with the single, “Song 2”. The last album featuring the band’s original lineup, 13 (1999) found Blur experimenting with electronic music and gospel music, as Albarn wrote more personal lyrics. In May 2002, Coxon left Blur during the recording of their seventh album Think Tank (2003). Containing electronic sounds and simpler guitar playing, the album was marked by Albarn’s growing interest in hip-hop and African music.

Delphic is an electronic/indie three piece that aims to be the future sound of Manchester, by mixing euphoric electronica with anthemic songs for a post-dance world. The group who formed in 2009, is made up of James Cook (vocals and bass), Matt Cocksedge (guitar) and Richard Boardman (synths). They are also accompanied by Dan Hadley on drums.

Delphic released their first single This Momentary in 2009 on the french record label Kitsuné. The last few months of 2009 were good months for Delphic they had their first TV appearance on “Later… with Jools Holland”, the video to “This Momentary” was nominated for 3 UK Music Video Awards and they were also nominated for the “BBC’s Sound of 2010 list” in which they came third.

The Start of 2010 brought a sell out UK tour and it saw the release of their debut album Acolyte which was released in the UK on 11th January, and entered the UK album charts at #8. In March Delphic released their fourth single Halcyon on Polydor records.

On June 29th, 2010 Delphic released Acolyte in North America on Los Angeles-based label Dangerbird Records.