Chill-out music

Chill-out music (sometimes also chillout, chill out or simply chill) is a genre of electronic music and an umbrella term for several styles of electronic music characterized by their mellow style and mid-tempo beats, "chill" being derived from a slang word for "relax".

Chill-out music emerged in the early and mid-1990s in "chill rooms" at dance clubs, where relaxing music was played to allow dancers a chance to "chill out" from the more emphatic and fast-tempo music played on the main dance floor.

The genres associated with chill-out are mostly ambient, trip hop, nu jazz, ambient house and other subgenres of downtempo. Sometimes, the easy listening subgenre lounge is considered to belong to the chill-out collection as well. Chill-out, as a musical genre or description, is synonymous with the more recently popularized terms "smooth electronica" and "soft techno", and it is a loose genre of music blurring into several other very distinct styles of electronic and lo-fi music.