Coldcut are an English electronic music duo composed of Matt Black and Jonathan More. Credited as pioneers for pop sampling in the 1980s, Coldcut are also considered the first stars of UK electronic dance music due to their innovative style, which featured cut-up samples of hip-hop, soul, funk, spoken word and various other types of music, as well as video and multimedia. According to Spin, "in '87 Coldcut pioneered the British fad for 'DJ records'".
Coldcut's records first introduced the public to pop artists Yazz and Lisa Stansfield, through which these artists achieved pop chart success. In addition, Coldcut has remixed and created productions on tracks by Eric B & Rakim, James Brown, Queen Latifah, Eurythmics, INXS, Steve Reich, Blondie, the Fall, Pierre Henry, Nina Simone, Fog, Red Snapper, and BBC Radiophonic Workshop.
Beyond their work as a production duo, Coldcut are the founders of Ninja Tune, an independent record label in London, England (with satellite offices in Los Angeles and Berlin) with an overall emphasis on encouraging interactive technology and finding innovative uses of software. The label's first releases (the first four volumes of DJ Food - Jazz Brakes) were produced by Coldcut in the early 1990s, and composed of instrumental hip-hop cuts that led the duo to help pioneer the trip hop genre, with artists such as Funki Porcini, the Herbaliser and DJ Vadim.
Music career 1980s In 1986, computer programmer Matt Black and ex-art teacher Jonathan More were part-time DJs on the rare groove scene. More also DJed on pirate radio, hosting the Meltdown Show on Kiss FM and worked at the Reckless Records store on Berwick Street, London where Black visited as a customer. The first collaboration between the two artists was "Say Kids What Time Is It?" on a white label in January 1987, which mixed The Jungle Book's "King of the Swingers" with the break from James Brown's "Funky Drummer". The innovation of "Say Kids..." caused More and Black to be heralded by SPIN as "the first Brit artists to really get hip-hop's class-cutup aesthetic". It is regarded as the UK's first breaks record, the first UK record to be built entirely of samples and "the final link in the chain connecting European collage-experiment with the dance-remix-scratch edit". This was later sampled in "Pump Up the Volume" by MARRS, a single that reached number one in the UK in October 1987.
Though Black had joined Kiss FM with his own mix-based show, the pair eventually joined forces on its own show later in 1987 called Solid Steel. The eclectic show became a unifying force in underground experimental electronic music and is still running, celebrating 25 years in 2013.
The duo adopted the name "Coldcut" and set up a record label called Ahead of Our Time to release the single "Beats + Pieces" (one of the formats also included "That Greedy Beat") in 1987. All of these tracks were assembled using cassette pause button edits and later spliced tape edits that would sometimes run "all over the room". The duo used sampling from Led Zeppelin to James Brown. Electronic act the Chemical Brothers have described "Beats + Pieces" as the "first bigbeat record", a style which appeared in the mid-1990s.
Coldcut's first mainstream success came when Julian Palmer from Island Records asked them to remix Eric B. & Rakim's "Paid in Full". Released in October 1987, the landmark remix is said to have "laid the groundwork for hip hop's entry into the UK mainstream", becoming a breakthrough hit for Eric B & Rakim outside the U.S., reaching No. 15 in the UK, and the top 20 in a number of European countries. It featured a prominent Ofra Haza sample and many other vocal cut ups as well as a looped rhythm which later, when sped up, proved popular in the Breakbeat genre. Off the back of its success in clubs, the Coldcut "Seven Minutes of Madness" remix ended up being promoted as the single in the UK.
In 1988, More and Black formed Hex, a self-titled "multimedia pop group", with Mile Visman and Rob Pepperell. While working on videos for artists such as Kevin Saunderson, Queen Latifah and Spiritualized, Hex's collaborative work went on to incorporate 3D modelling, punk video art, and algorithmic visuals on desktop machines. The video for Coldcut's 'Christmas Break' in 1989 is arguably one of the first pop promos produced entirely on microcomputers.
In 1988, Coldcut released Out to Lunch With Ahead of Our Time, a double LP of Coldcut productions and re-cuts, and the various aliases under which the duo had recorded. This continued the duo's tradition of releasing limited available vinyl.
The next Coldcut single, released in February 1988, moved towards a more house-influenced style. "Doctorin' the House", which debuted singer Yazz, became a top ten hit, and peaked at No. 6. In the same year, under the guise Yazz and the Plastic Population, they produced "The Only Way Is Up", a cover of a Northern soul song. The record reached No. 1 in the UK in August, and remained there for five weeks, becoming 1988's second biggest selling single. Producer Youth of Killing Joke also helped Coldcut with this record. The duo had another top hit in September with "Stop This Crazy Thing", which featured reggae vocalist Junior Reid and reached number 21 in the UK.
The single "People Hold On" became another UK Top 20 hit. Released in March 1989, it helped launch the career of the then relatively unknown singer Lisa Stansfield. Coldcut and Mark Saunders produced her debut solo single "This Is the Right Time", which became another UK Top 20 hit in August as well as reaching No. 21 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 the following year.
As the duo started to enjoy critical and commercial success, their debut album What's That Noise? was released in April 1989 on Ahead of Our Time and distributed by Big Life Records. The album gave "breaks the full length treatment", and showcased "their heady blend of hip-hop production aesthetics and proto-acid house grooves". It also rounded up a heap of unconventional guest features, quoted by SPIN as having "somehow found room at the same table for Queen Latifah and Mark E. Smith". The album's track "I'm in Deep" (featuring Smith) prefigured the indie-dance guitar-breaks crossover of such bands as the Stone Roses and Happy Mondays, utilizing Smith's freestyle raucous vocals over an acid house backing, and also including psych guitar samples from British rock band Deep Purple. What's That Noise? reached the Top 20 in the UK and was certified Silver.
1990s Coldcut's second album, Some Like It Cold, released in 1990 on Ahead of Our Time, featured a collaboration with Queen Latifah on the single "Find a Way". Though "Find a Way" was a minor hit in the UK, no more singles were released from the album. The duo was given the BPI "Producer of the Year Award" in 1990. Hex - alongside some other London visual experimenters such as iE - produced a series of videos for a longform VHS version of the album. This continued Coldcut and Hex's pioneering of the use of microcomputers to synthesize electronic music visuals.
After their success with Lisa Stansfield, Coldcut signed with her label, Arista. Conflicts arose with the major label, as Coldcut's "vision extended beyond the formulae of house and techno" and mainstream pop culture (CITATION: The Virgin Encyclopedia Of Nineties Music, 2000). Eventually, the duo's album Philosophy emerged in 1993. Singles "Dreamer" and "Autumn Leaves" (1994) sung by vocalist Janis Alexander were both minor hits but the album did not chart.
"Autumn Leaves" had strings recorded at Abbey Road, with a 30-piece string section and an arrangement by film composer Ed Shearmur. The leader of the string section was Simon Jeffes of Penguin Cafe Orchestra. Coldcut's insistence on their friend Mixmaster Morris to remix "Autumn Leaves" led to one of Morris' most celebrated remixes, which became a minor legend in ambient music. It has appeared on numerous compilations.
In 1990, whilst on their first tour in Japan (which also featured Norman Cook, who later became Fatboy Slim), Matt and Jon formed their second record label, Ninja Tune, as a self-titled "technocoloured escape pod", and a way to escape the creative control of major labels. The label enabled them to release music under different aliases (e.g. Bogus Order, DJ Food), which also helped them to avoid pigeonholing as producers. Ninja Tune's first release was Bogus Order's "Zen Brakes". The name Coldcut stayed with Arista so there were no official Coldcut releases for the next three years.
During this time, Coldcut still produced for artists on their new label, releasing a flood of material under different names and continuing to work with young groups. They additionally kept on with Solid Steel on Kiss FM and running the night club Stealth (Club of the Year in the NME, The Face, and Mixmag in 1996).
In 1991, Hex released their first video game, Top Banana, which was included on a Hex release for the Commodore CDTV machine in 1992, arguably the first complete purpose-designed multimedia system. Top Banana was innovative in that it used sampled graphics, contained an ecological theme and a female lead character (dubbed "KT"), and its music changed through random processes. Coldcut and Hex presented this multimedia project as an example of the forthcoming convergence of pop music and computer-game characters.
In 1992, Hex's first single - "Global Chaos" / "Digital Love Opus 1" - combined rave visuals with techno and ambient interactive visuals. In November of that year, Hex released Global Chaos CDTV, which took advantage of the possibilities of the new CD-ROM medium. The Global Chaos CDTV disk (which contained the Top Banana game, interactive visuals and audio), was a forerunner of the "CD+" concept, uniting music, graphics, and video games into one. This multi-dimensional entertainment product received wide coverage in the national media, including features on Dance Energy, Kaleidoscope on BBC Radio 4, What's Up Doc? on ITV and Reportage on BBC Two. i-D Magazine was quoted as saying, "It's like your TV tripping".
Coldcut videos were made for most songs, often by Hexstatic, and used a lot of stock and sampled footage. Their "Timber" video, which created an AV collage piece using analogous techniques to audio sample collage, was put on heavy rotation on MTV. Stuart Warren Hill of Hexstatic referred to this technique as: "What you see is what you hear". "Timber" (which appears on both Let Us Play, Coldcut's fourth album, and Let Us Replay, their fifth) won awards for its innovative use of repetitive video clips synced to the music, including being shortlisted at the Edinburgh Television and Film Festival in their top five music videos of the year in 1998.
Coldcut began integrating video sampling into their live DJ gigs at the time, and incorporated multimedia content that caused press to credit the act as segueing "into the computer age". Throughout the 90s, Hex created visuals for Coldcut's live performances, and developed the CD-ROM portion of Coldcut's Let Us Play and Let Us Replay, in addition to software developed specifically for the album's world tour. Hex's inclusion of music videos and "playtools" (playful art/music software programs) on Coldcut's CD-ROM was completely ahead of the curve at that time, offering viewers/listeners a high level of interactivity. Playtools such as My Little Funkit and Playtime were the prototypes for Ninja Jamm, the app Coldcut designed and launched 16 years later. Playtime followed on from Coldcut and Hex's Synopticon installation, developing the auto-cutup algorhythm, and using other random processes to generate surprising combinations. Coldcut and Hex performed live using Playtime at the 1st Sonar Festival in 1994. Playtime was also used to generate the backing track for Coldcut's collaboration with Jello Biafra, "Every Home a Prison".