Coldcut Interview

What is the story behind Coldcut?
Well it’s a long one. John and I were there at the beginning of the UK DJ scene in the early 80’s, then when house music and sampling kicked off we made our first record, “Hey kids, what time is it?” inspired by some cut up records from the states. After that people realised we had a fresh sound and way of doing things so we had some pop hits, put some vocalists on our tracks like Lisa Stansfield “people hold on”, Yazz “The only way is up”. We did a remix of an Erick b and Rakim track, which was a notorious reworking defining the idea of remix. Then we started doing our own thing as Coldcut, started our own label, Ninja Tune and got very interested in multimedia and the visual side of things. We are taking the aesthetics of DJ and hip-hop and make it more interesting and expanding it beyond the idea of just scratching records.

You’ve got a new album out in the charts, “Sound Mirrors”, how do you feel the public received it?
Well, we’ve been pretty made up with very good reactions universally. There is a big fashion for guitar music and rock revival, which is great as I’m into quite a lot of that myself. We’ve been saying for quite a while that dance music itself has got a bit tired and needs some fresh ideas to move on. A lot of these bands coming up have actually been through the dance scene themselves and have listened to Iggy Pop and got their own decks and translated that into rock. I think people are actually quite grateful that someone from the dance scene has come out with an album that is vaguely coherent and got some depth to it. Last week the news was dance is dead, rock rules again, but this week it is old dance like Coldcut have made a really good album now, that shows that dance is not actually dead. So, its been pretty good timing for us.

Is the album like the title a reflection of sounds already around and remixed like cutting and pasting in collage?
As you say it’s a reflection. Sound mirrors is a reference to the idea that sound mirrors are experience of our feelings and emotions and also a lot of the way we work is about using sound in a visual way. The ways that one composes of cut and paste now-a-days using waveforms and onscreen grids and patterns are quite visual. There is also the way we work with audio visual material exploring different ways to relate sound and image to each other you can see that in some of our early work like “Timber”. Also if you turn on itunes you get your visualizer and playing some music it translates it into visual patterns, also sound mirrors. So it’s a phrase that means various things.

Who were you collaborating with on the album?
There is a range of different vocalists including Roots Manuva from Ninja Tune, the star of the track “True Skool” which has got to be my one of my favourites. John Spencer on “Everything is under control” and Annette Peacock who is a well-known jazz experimentalist and vocalist. There’s some fresh young talent and some also older established names. Saul Williams also who is a young black American poet and then there is Amiri Baraka who is the granddaddy of American black radical poetry.

You are playing in Nottingham at the Rescue Rooms on Sunday 19th February, are any special guests appearing from the album?
Yeah we have Robert Owens who is know as the voice of house music from back in the days of the summer of love, he is a fantastic vocalist. Then there is a new talent who is called Mpo Skeefbacking, she is a young south London soul singer she is on the track This Island Earth. I think we are going to have a hip-hop input from Mike Land too.

Have you played Nottingham before?
Yes, at The Brain but I don’t think that’s around anymore and The Bomb.

You are known for VJing, how do you find it? Is there a signatory Matt Black style?
Well you could get the style best by having a look at our software. Called Vjamm you can download a free demo from the site and it also comes as a demo on Sound Mirrors, just for PC. We can’t develop a Mac version, though if someone gave me 50grand I would do it next week but at the moment it is just a pottage industry. That programme comes with a bundle of what I call video break beats and they are the same ones as we use in the live shows, you can get a big stash of my personal audio visual library there and have a mess with it yourself and probably do better than I can do with it! I totally recommend having a go at VJing if you are into beats, it is a revelation!

Do you think that in this case anyone can VJ?
I say anyone can do anything if they tune their mind into it. It is just a question of focus and dedication and faith and practice. I am learning to drum at the moment and I am completely useless at it but I am really enjoying it and I am going to get better.

I’ve seen on your website the MYCCTV of uploaded videos from the audiences cameras, what was the intention?
The intention is to gather together a pool of material submitted by our fans, for them to show some of the things they are interested in about us and about the scene we are sharing. Once we’ve got a good library of material we can then post it up and make it available. It’s a sharing community thing or as my American friend Mark Canter says “digital lifestyle aggregation” (a buzz word at the moment) making a community and an interest group out of this entire fantastic media that we can gather on our cameras and phones now-a-days and making art out of it. That is what we are going to be doing in the mid term.

How do you think the visual works with audio?
There is many ways in which one can work sound and image together. Vjamm is one-way and sound mirrors. Most of us are luck enough to have our eyes and ears, as humans are audiovisual animals and it is interesting to mess with that and make art, which feeds all those senses. Opera is also an audiovisual experience so it ain’t no new thing. What is fantastic now with a lot of things is the ability to create on your desktop and on a laptop, which costs a few hundred quid. I’ve got the video editing studio and an audio studio that is comparable with big studios that would’ve cost hundreds of thousands of pounds just a few years ago. It is a pretty big step forward.

Yeah, quite nice to take it all round in a little box.
Absolutely, sit in my campervan and do jamming!

What has made you most proud?
I think the idea that we’ve helped turn a lot of people onto doing this stuff themselves. We get a lot of people come up to us and say “Your work has inspired me to start making my own music or make my own films” or “I use your music as sound tracks for my video games.” That idea that we can actually spread the vibe that making art is fun and a great human creative tool is spreading the love of making as far and wide as possible. If people go into making art they wouldn’t have as much time to be horrible to each other.

Coldcut played the Rescue Rooms on Sunday 19 February 2006 as part of the Spectrum 5th Birthday events.