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By Dan MacIntosh Ample sample Their wheels are still spinning. Jonathan More and Matt Black, the two veteran DJs collectively known as Coldcut, know that their partnership spanning two decades is more the exception than the rule in the oftentimes trendy and fickle world of hip-hop and dance music. Most partnerships dont last that long, Black says, commenting on Coldcuts extended musical career. Most marriages dont last that long. But Jonathan and I have been fundamentally reasonable people and we enjoy each other. Its boring to split up and do all that ego-type thing, so we find it more satisfying to just kind of work things out. When youre young, you dont think 20 years forward, really, do you? You just sort of get on with it and thats what weve done. In addition to being blessed with natural compatibility, a few wise financial decisions also contributed positively to More and Blacks happy musical marriage. One agreement we made very near the beginning of Coldcut was that we would split credit and financial returns from anything done under the Coldcut name equally, 50/50, between us, no matter who was actually involved in doing it, Black explains. This is because we understood that we would have different roles within the project and that these roles might change. Coldcuts early single, Hey Kids, What Time Is It? has been dubbed the first sample-built U.K. record. But did Coldcut even realize they were blazing a new trail at the time? That claim, actually, is slightly unjustified, Black clarifies. It doesnt really acknowledge the work by people like The Art Of Noise, for instance, who were also using samples earlier than that. Id revise that, actually, to say that Hey Kids was the first record that gave London DJ culture an identity. I think we realized that we were in the right place, at the right time. Partly we were lucky to be there; partly we made that happen ourselves out of our own initiative. And I think we did realize that that was a sort of a changing time in music and that there was going to be a sort of revolution in the way that music was made and that DJing would become an important of part of that. So I think we kind of knew what time it was. The title of the acts new album, Sound Mirrors (Ninjatune, the album the duo founded), refers in part to military devices that preceded radar. But it also carries a deeper meaning than that. It just seemed like a good name for the album, says Black, In that it could be expanded beyond that sort of literal meaning, to the idea that sound mirrors life and that there are different ways in which sound can be mirrored and expressed, and that sound, memory and emotion are closely related. On the web: www.www.coldcut.net |
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Copyright © 2002 Mean Street Magazine, LLC |
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