Mix media

Coldcut's new sounds and visions

Coldcut have never met a slogan they couldn't get down with. The British hip-hop duo adorn their intricately collaged scratch-and-paste compositions -- 10 of which get further jumbled on a new remix album, Let Us Replay (Ninja Tune) -- with catch-phrases seemingly cribbed from the T-shirts of media-activist ravers: "Fuck Dance, Let's Art"; "Remix Your TV"; "The Abuse of Copyright Materials Can Be Hazardous to Your Wealth." They've even swiped the "copy-left" symbol, a backward "C" software developers use when they want to ensure the free distribution of the programs they create. It shows up on Replay's spine, pressed into service as the Coldcut logo.

Granted, there's a fair amount of British cheek behind the catch-phrases. But with Coldcut's Jonathan More and Matt Black, the art-school yuks are always only half the story. Splicing together funk drums and Cold War propaganda, Coldcut's music flips the fast-break sound of pioneers like Grandmaster Flash and Double Dee & Steinski as a class-clown critique of information overload. On classic More/Black productions like "Paid in Full (Seven Minutes of Madness)," this approach turns hip-hop into sweepingly eclectic slapstick -- remixing a no-nonsense Eric B and Rakim single, the duo deploy the unlikeliest of punch-ins (Saturday Night Live announcer Don Pardo, Middle Eastern vocalist Ofra Haza) to take the original through that psychedelic time tunnel from Willy Wonka's chocolate factory.

Mind-blowing mixes aside, Coldcut have never become convincing auteurs. They've spent much of the '90s in "neutral," endlessly updating and retooling songs from their glory days and commissioning remixes from underground stars like Cornelius and DJ Kid Koala in a more-or-less successful effort to stay current. The best Coldcut music you can buy actually belongs to other people, from "Paid in Full" (still indisputably Rakim's) to the Silent Poets' sublime take on "Border" (featured on Replay).

But More and Black have turned their style into a winning A&R philosophy via the great Ninja Tune label, and their aesthetic restlessness continues to take sample-based music to places it's never been before -- when the duo throw down live, they rock laptops and video montages alongside up to four turntables, old-school fools hyped on new-school technology. Coldcut's music comes alive only as other artists repackage and reimagine it, but that may be their conceptual ace in the hole, the quality that makes them ideal composers for the next century -- they bring so many cooks into the kitchen that conventional notions of source and authorship inevitably short-circuit.

Given all that, maybe it was inevitable that More and Black would come up with something like VJamm. Bundled on a CD-ROM with Let Us Replay, VJamm is a PC-based multimedia mixing application that lets users "play" audio and video clips the way a DJ works a turntable, cutting sounds and images to the beat. It's the next logical step for Coldcut's remix-centric creative process: hand the toys to the consumer and you erase that pesky line between jock and audience. With the commercial version of VJamm -- available on Coldcut's Web site: (www.ninjatune.net -- users can upload their own raw materials and literally "remix TV." (The "beta" version included with Replay is less interactive, and you have to work with what you're given, banks of clips from Coldcut tracks like "Timber" and "Atomic Moog 2000.")

I played with the VJamm demo for more than three hours and came away fascinated and frustrated, having created only a jerky "More Beats and Pieces" remix as annoying as anything in the Atari Teenage Riot catalogue. I could never get all the video clips to load at once, so my mixes were full of the kind of gaps that would get you gonged from a DJ battle before the qualifying round. And though the program's main interface is simple enough -- it looks like a piano, with a thumbnail of each audio/video clip corresponding to a particular key -- the confusing array of sliders and pull-down menus in the sample-tweaking window made me wish for something self-explanatory, like the instrument panel of a DC-3.

Still, it's not hard to see the potential in a product like VJamm. If DJs become VJs, appropriating images from Felicity or Meet the Press and making them dance to a different (sampled) drummer, it could do for television what the advent of "scratching" did for vinyl, turning passive consumers into active interpreters. Or as the always-quick-with-a-soundbite Coldcut put it, "I think, therefore I Jamm." "Must-see TV," welcome to the machine.