Cut & Paste: A Conversation with Matt Black of Coldcut
On the politics, aesthetics, and technologies of sample-based music.
Words By Ricardo Miguel Vieira
It’s a strange feeling reading old interviews with Matt Black, half of mixing grandmasters Coldcut, and ending up with the impression that one is actually revisiting the present. Like when he foresaw ten years ago that the world would become a much more dangerous place, or when he anticipated with his duo-companion Jonathan More that electronic music would be essential again as soon as a new generation unearths and reinterprets it. Perhaps that explains why this Londoner once claimed a talent for predicting the future. He always lived years ahead of the pack, anyway.
Beyond the prescient words, Coldcut’s sharply revolutionary art speaks for itself. It’s one fine kaleidoscopic statement of both past and present, be it in music production or radical politics. In fairness, none of these elements are isolated atoms in the duo’s body of work, which has assumed many translations over the years. Coldcut’s early explorations were established on sampling cut-ups and quirky mixes influenced by hip-hop’s swift progression. Their creations were one-of-a-kind, pioneering the art of mixing whilst establishing both a far-out visual aesthetic and a place in British musical history. Yet, it was Black and More’s do-it-yourself approach that gave them an offbeat reach and allowed them to forge a path through roads less travelled, from starting their longstanding radio show “Solid Steel” to developing audio-visual manipulating software.
Black is devoted to carving his own sound architecture in the electronic scene, an assuring sign of longevity for a music inventor and computer programmer who’s been part of the ever-changing relation between producers and technologies in this hyper-connected world. Hip-hop, the root of Coldcut’s identity, has also navigated the transformative wave, with young producers - just like Black predicted - independently reinventing the scope of the genre through solid compositions and renewed sampling styles.
With this in mind, I sat down for a chat with Matt about the meaning of the sample in contemporary hip-hop culture, and the genre’s influence in shaping Coldcut’s identity.
Coldcut are considered champions of sample-based compositions and masters of cut-up hip-hop collages.I’m wondering if you see yourselves emerging more from hip-hop or early electronic experimentations?
We come from hip-hop. We were looking for the perfect beat, something new to interface us to the future, and I felt hip-hop was a futuristic sound. It was the strongest musical influence on Jonathan and I. Records from America inspired us to try and make our own cut-ups, so that’s what we did using turntables and a four-track cassette; and I guess Jon and I have always been using tapes to make mixes or little jingles. Records like The Adventures of GrandMaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel and Double Dee & Stenski’s Lessons 1, 2 & 3 were blueprints for us, they were outrageous and we wanted to work out how to do something like that. Hip-hop was all about sampling, so we were particularly interested in production, scratching and DJing – the electronic music making side of it. The DJ’s ability to take slabs of vinyl and manipulate it, in real time, with this lovely interface called a turntable mixer. Hip-hop was a really good channel for that. It was fascinating. Although we did live mixes, we made our first record using that interface, taping that live-jam-scratch-party and putting the results on plastic.
Let me touch on your remarkable remix of Eric B & Rakim’s “Paid in Full”. That was a landmark both for the project but also for the mixing scene in the UK. How do you see that project in regards of its role on where Coldcut is now?
“Paid in Full” was the remix that made our career. We’d been releasing our own records independently in London but pretending that they came from America. Then Julian Palmer, from 4th & Broadway Records,wanted to get a remix of Eric B & Rakim - and he came to us because of those records. He said he could only give us £750, but we loved Eric B & Rakim, those guys were dons, and it was an opportunity to work with an American hip-hop artist, so we went along. That was a great opportunity and we did it in an unexpected way. It fitted the appetite of the moment, it did very well, was a very big hit around the world. The success of that record was a big part of our career.
Having worked with American hip-hop artists, when it comes back to UK grime, how different are thedecisions in production and sampling?
I’d say the grime producers don’t work with old loops so much. They take samples, but are more into a sound that’s great in the clubs - original, heavy, clean, synthesised. Personally, I like to mix that with the analogue, the clean and the dirty, the heavy and the fizzy. Grime has gone in a different direction with finding an old record and sampling it. It’s almost orchestrally inspired, actually. I hear it more like some Götterdämmerung orchestra-opera hip-hop than just sampling a lick.
The fact that grime doesn’t use loops in favour of something more orchestral may be reflective of a genre that didn’t exist before the internet, so there’s always been more developed tools and resources instantly available online. Do you feel the internet has transformed the art of sampling?
The internet, like sampling, is a by-product of technology; it happened because of technology and then fed back into it. All these digital technologies are very much intertwined. It’s all part of the same thing basically, it’s information. But the techniques nowadays are pretty much the same. What happened is that samples have gotten a lot more powerful. We have a million times more memory, capacity and processing power than before. It’s still about taking slabs of sound, like sound frozen in time, and then manipulating it in different ways. Looping, processing, scratching, chopping it up. We picked up the new technologies as soon as they became democratised and pushed them as much as we could, and we took that attitude and aesthetic and applied it to making visuals, too.
Your visual identity and accompanying technologies is unique and was ahead of its time. It also triggered the development of unique software tools, like VJamm, that blend multiple aspects of music production. What motivates you to build your own working tools?
We built our own software so that we could manipulate sound and visuals for our live shows through the ’90sthat we were broadcasting on piratetv.net, which was an early, experimental jamming and streaming station, and then we kept developing it. Ableton Live appeared at a certain point and that changed things. There’s a danger in using Live because it became very easy for everyone, and everything, to sound the same, so I became more interested in developing our own software. We developed various bits for manipulating sounds and visuals and currently we have the Ninja Jam app. For me, that app is my comment on electronic music and hip-hop, as well as sampling and remixing - things we’ve been involved with for the last 30 years – all boiled down into this new application that I continue developing to make even more funky! That’s the instrument that Coldcut uses live now. I’m excited about it as a new arena, beyond turntablism, which kind of peaked out. It’s all very well recycling old instruments of the past, but we actually want something new, so I’m into designing that.
And in what ways does the evolution of music production technologies reflect what we hear today?
Every technology has a mood, which may be defined by the ways it’s first used by humans. An old record like EPMD’s Strictly Business is so raw and funky, it has a special feeling that I love. I would always play that in the club because I know people recognise that human feeling, it’s in its DNA. Scanning through a piece of vinyl with your hands on the record is a very direct way to navigate the material and although I don’t do that so muchnow, I still love it as an interface. On the other hand, modern, really well produced records would sound heavy on a big system. I love that too, although it becomes boring sometimes because every record is so maxed out that when you look at it in WAV format, it’s just a solid bar of black, there’s no dynamic range. You can’t deny that it thumps out on a big rig and nowadays, sound systems are a lot more powerful, especially in the sub-bass department, so people mixing records ring out that energy, and I admire that. All these approaches have their charms.
Do you think sampling has the same meaning to hip-hop today as it did 20 years ago, considering the change in production styles?
It does evolve, but I’m not sure that’s where the most cutting edge uses of sampling are at the moment. There’s a fairly generic formula with hip-hop sampling nowadays. Still, there are people pushing the boundaries, like Flying Lotus for example, and for me, that’s where the cutting edge is. Sampling is a form of hip-hop, but it isn’t just about old school hip-hop nor just about rap. It’s about production and coming up with authentic new sonic.
What is interesting is that conversations about hip-hop’s edginess and authenticity boils down to new school versus the old school…
Everything exists as dualities, as polarities. Night and day; good and evil; analogue and digital; old school and new school. They don’t mean anything without each other. I’m not so interested in conversations about old school or new school being the best, the same goes with analogue or digital. I think that’s all a load of bollocks. For me it’s about mixing it up and standing on a balancing point between the polarities and working them to your will. There were some good records made back in the day, but it’s more about an attitude than the technology. I recently listened to a lot of Schoolly D, and EPMD, and the groove and rawness of those records is undeniable. You could make an even ruder record than Strictly Business on a basic program like Fruityloops, if you had the attitude to do so. Every so often someone comes along and rattles the box and changes production for everyone by virtue of a new sound that they create. The thing I’ve heard most recently that did that was the Arrival soundtrack. There’s a lot of sampling in there that would’ve been unthinkable 20 or 30 years ago when soundtracks were always about an orchestra with strings and maybe a few synths. But now the cutting edge sonic weapons are sampling and granular synthesis, which, in a way, are a combination of sampling and synths. I would say Arrival’s soundtrack is a masterpiece, and not just when regarding soundtracks. I’d say that it ups the ante generally for electronic music, and that includes hip-hop. We should all go and bow down and work how that guy is making those fucking outrageous sounds, really.
Definitely. Sampling has been re-invented and developed so much over the years, up to the point of theoutrageous sounds made by the aforementioned granular synthesis - would you say that it’s a revolutionary art?
Sampling is a neutral technique which could be used to make a Marlboro cigarettes advertisement if you put your mind to it, there’s nothing inherently revolutionary about it. I think there’s a lot of possibilities, and I love it because it gives me access to the whole history of culture and I like searching through that for things I find inspiring; being able to recycle them into a modern context and give them to a modern audience’s ears. Hip-hop is about sampling, it’s still a search for the ultimate sample that’s nestling in those dusty old crates, waiting for someone to go “a-ha, that’s a fucking loop!”
Touching on the political, using elements of history and culture within music can be a way of processing and interpreting current events, are you still using sampling to this effect?
For years I’ve been working on a track called “Papua Merdeka”, which is “Freedom for West Papua”. The country has been invaded by Indonesia and lots of terrible genocides have been going on. The track will be about freedom for Papua and a call to end the genocide. It will feature the wife of the head of West Papua’s People Tribal Assembly, a family that are friends of ours. It’s highly politically focused and it’s going to be a sample-based track. It takes the voices of the community members to, hopefully, make a revolutionary hit to help create profile, change and freedom... so in that sense, sampling is working for me. I’d say if you look at history, most artists and musicians used to be called leftists or vague socialists. Those terms are so loathed now that I would really like to define a new one that people agree is good. There’s a lot of people in the world that can agree on the basics of ‘good’ and I think most artists and musicians in the past would support that. That is a revolutionary statement, because the psychotic elite are so well off on the back of the rest of us that it will take a revolution to shake them off. It’s the attitude really. Do you want to do something, or you just want to consume? We’re the creators.
This story was originally published in BRICK Edition 3, released in 2017.
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