 According to American critic Robert Christgau , Maxinquaye 's groove @-@ oriented and low @-@ tempo music drew not only on dub but also on lo @-@ fi , ambient techno , and hip hop , while James Hunter from Rolling Stone said Tricky subsumed American hip hop , soul , reggae , and 1980s English rock sounds into " a mercurial style of dance music " . Entertainment Weekly critic David Browne classified the music as an intellectual form of R & B. In Tricky 's own words , he composed his songs based on a particular sound he liked rather than having a definite song structure in mind : " I couldn 't write you a blues track or a hip @-@ hop track if you asked . I just make what I hear and then me and Martina sing all the words on paper , putting the emphasis on the things that perhaps shouldn 't be sung . " Tricky had no concept of pitch , regard for notational conventions and time signatures , or previous experience with sampling , but his approach for Maxinquaye challenged Saunders to rethink his ideas about music production and experiment in ways he had never tried before . Saunders recalled being asked to combine samples of two songs that were 30 beats per minute apart and composed in entirely different keys : " [ Tricky ] thought differently to anybody I 've ever known ... It didn 't occur to me that by de @-@ tuning one to slow it down , both might then gel musically at that point . I always think of it like going into a scrapyard and building a car out of all the bits you can find . You could probably build a car that would work , and although it might be the ugliest you 've ever seen , it would have loads of character . " 
