Pump Up the HTML

Coldcut's Matt Black on electronica, life as an indie mogul, and wired fatherhood

By Marc Weidenbaum

A visit to Ninja Tune's Internet home page -- much of which Black programmed -- confirms the toy fixation, though return trips are required for one to navigate fully all of the strange tangents, data wells, and banks of animation and music. As if in a house overrun by children, one need not wander much further than the entrance in order to stumble over playthings. The web site (www.obsolete.com/pipe) portrays the record label's logo as a Nintendo game and as a Tamagotchi, one of those virtual pets that expires if neglected.

The site also renders Black and partner More as colorful little children's dolls, albeit hipster dolls whose accessories include not only mixer, turntables, and headphones, but three-day stubble and Buddy Holly glasses. Among the Ninja Tune site's varied "content" is an engaging contraption called My Little Funkit, a virtual drum machine filled with half a megabyte of recombinant ambient, jungle, house, and drum'n'bass music samples. And Coldcut's latest album, which combines many of these same samples with such studio ingenuity and fresh funk as to assure its place among 1997's finest, is titled, simply, Let Us Play.

"Really, that's just marking time," Black says of Funkit, which is included on Let Us Play's bonus CD-ROM disc. "What we really want to do is put all this shit up there on the web with an interactive engine which you download and then you can actually just remix yourself, indefinitely." What he says next come across like a threat: "And we're very near, really, to being able to do that."

Perhaps they are, and perhaps it is a threat. Black and More made Coldcut's name and small fortune producing Lisa Stansfield, Eric B and Rakim, and Yazz, among others, in the late '80s and early '90s, straining all along with major-label politics and the mainstreaming of dance music. "It nearly finished us off," he says. "Not an experience you get to repeat." The tenure culminated with a brief, ill-fated stint at Arista, after which Coldcut retreated to the indie underground to do battle. Hence the cartoonish ninja warrior theme, the publicity-lite "Stealth" package tours of Ninja Tune luminaries -- and, hence, the threat of remaking pop music in Coldcut's own, cut'n'paste image. Black imagines a situation where listeners, enabled by technology, will have the final say over mixes, track sequences, even personnel. The new album opens with an adult male voice saying, "To get started turn the computer on. Now, press load and press the enter key."

"I think what people call hypertext offers some fantastic possibilities for making new kinds of information spaces and entertainment engines," says Black. The clinical lucidity of this description doesn't do justice to the mad phonics that are Coldcut's tunes. Let Us Play collects a dozen tracks of up-to-the-minute electronica, ranging from the anti-nuke dub confection "Atomic Moog 2000," to the breakbeat of "Return to the Margin," to the mechanized lullaby of "Music for No Musicians," to the full-out trance of "Timber." Upping the release's kaleidoscopic breadth are the aforementioned CD-ROM disc (which includes eight complete videos, a trivia game, over 200 music samples, and more) and a slew of guests, among them former Dead Kennedys frontman Jello Biafra, confrontation poet Salena Saliva, ubiquitous tabla player Talvin Singh, and session drummer extraordinaire Bernard Purdie. Despite the rotating cast, though, the album is rich in intimate moments, like how a drum loop tweaks the rhythm of the album's opening juju riff, or Chris Leslie's fiddle solo on "Panopticon," or the nostalgic reprisal of "More Beats and Pieces," a flash back to Coldcut's second, and now decade old, single.

Black mentions that somehow, while recording Let Us Play and running Ninja Tune, he managed to become a father. His son's name is Ki, Japanese for "tree" and "cosmic life force" and lots of other things, according to Dad. Asked what he has learned from Ki, Black says, "Seeing a child learning and playing, playing without restriction or inhibition, is something that has stirred me and, I think, Jon as well -- that stirred the soup of the album."

Black confirms that is Ki's voice which appears a few minutes after the album's final song has ended. Little Ki, just like his father, putting out his best material -- an infectious gurgle laugh -- and waiting, expectantly, to be sampled.  

Originally published in Pulse! magazine, November 1997.

Copyright © 1997 Marc Weidenbaum. All rights reserved.  

Full transcript of Matt Black interview

Ninja Tune Records' Pipe web site