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ColdcutArticle from Music Technology, November 1988 |
Mott Black and Jonathan More have enjoyed success as DJs, record producers and artists in their own right. Simon Trask takes it from scratch.
From a bogus 12" American import that stormed clubland, to remixes that have stormed the charts, Coldcut have championed cutup music.
IN JANUARY 1987, some ten years after the punk uprising, a quiet revolution took place in the UK. A certain white-label import 12" record appeared in London's dance-music shops in limited quantities. The record was 'Say Kids, What Time is It?' by Coldcut. It was a mix record in the tradition of US cutup master Steinski which combined go go, funk and hip hop beats with music from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and The Jungle Book in one insane but exhilarating mix. The first and only run of 500 copies quickly sold out as the buzz went around London's underground music community.
For a record which is owned by only 500 people, 'Say Kids' has had a tremendous influence both on the UK dance music scene and the UK charts. The record turned out not to be American at all, but the product of two underground London DJs, Matt Black and Jonathan More. In little over 18 months, the pair have become dance-music producers of stature, and have ably demonstrated their versatility by scoring both commercial and underground successes. What's more, the multi-dimensional Coldcut look like ending the reign of the one-dimensional PWL empire. Recently, Livingston Studios (the pair's home-from-home) knocked PWL Studios off the number one studio spot, Yazz's Coldcut-produced 'The Only Way is Up' is the biggest-selling single of the year to date (keeping Kylie Minogue's SAW-produced 'Locomotion' from the No. 1 chart spot), and the Coldcut-owned record label Ahead of Our Time recently won the Mecca prize for services to the disco industry, a prize won by Stock Aitken and Waterman last year.
SITTING ALONGSIDE FELLOW DJ and partner Jonathan More in the pair's pokey programming-suite-cum-office at north London's Livingston Studios (they have ready access to Livingston's three studios, including use of an SSL desk, when they need it). Matt Black recalls that he was inspired to put together 'Say Kids' by "the fact that everyone else was too useless to actually do anything."
Black, Oxford science graduate and former computer programmer for Logica, is the intense one of the pair, while art graduate More is more easy-going. Both are veterans of the London underground club scene, while More was also a founder member of pirate radio station Kiss FM. Both still DJ on Kiss, playing a challenging range of music in keeping with their varied tastes and enquiring minds.
It was a shared admiration for Steinski which eventually brought More and Black together. As Black recalls with a grin: "We were the only two people in London who'd been mad enough to fork out £45 each for a copy of 'Lesson Three'." 'Lesson Three' is one of three classic Double D and Steinski cutup mixes known as 'History of Hip Hop, Lessons One, Two and Three'. Steinski went on to create the powerful cutup 'And the Motorcade Sped On', which was based around Walter Cronkite's commentary on the John F Kennedy assassination. None of these records have ever seen official release, instead circulating on the black market scene.
Coldcut have no qualms about acknowledging Steinski's influence, while being disparaging about the spate of sample records which followed on the success of their own Eric B 'Paid in Full' remix and M/A/R/R/S' 'Pump Up the Volume'.
Black: "Double D and Steinski were the teachers in the art of master-mixing, and Lessons One, Two and Three were the text. Unfortunately, some students learnt the text a little too literally. We said right from the beginning that if people treated the mix record as a formula then they were going to kill it. Unfortunately that's more or less what's happened."
'Say Kids' was recorded using two Technics SL1200 decks, a £200 Citronic disco mixer, Yamaha MT44 four-track, MTR 6:4 mixer and an old-style Sanyo cassette deck with mechanical pause-button.
"I got pause-button editing down to a fine art". Black recalls. "I edited the backing track together on the Sanyo with the pause buttton, recorded that onto the four-track, put stuff down on the other tracks, and mixed everything down through the Citronic onto the Sanyo.
"We toyed with the idea of doing the whole thing again in a 16-track studio, but decided the result we already had was good enough. You could spend your whole life making the perfect record; by the time it came out, it would be out of date - certainly in the field of dance music."
'Say Kids' was a landmark - and for more than purely musical reasons. With it Black and More instigated the much-imitated "import scam", which they developed from a mixture of lack of faith in traditional channels, awareness of "pro-import snobbery" of UK DJs, and uncertainty of the legal consequences of what they were doing.
"We felt that we were making a record that was legitimate by our definitions but probably not by a lot of other people's," says Black. "We fully expected that when we turned up at the pressing plant we'd be arrested by the MCPS, who'd be saying 'It's all Kurtis Blow's music and Walt Disney's music'."
Instead, the success of 'Say Kids' inspired them to produce their next mix, 'Beats and Pieces'. In typical eclectic style, the underlying beat was one bar of a Led Zeppelin break, 'Kashmir', sped up to 45rpm and spread over six minutes courtesy of Black's pause-button editing. This time they created a massive tape loop which went around the entire room "hanging off pencils and mike stands".
From such low-tech means the duo progressed to a Casio RZ1 drum machine, which they used for their next mixes, 'The Music Maker' and 'That Greedy Beat'. Here they used the RZ1 to provide a basic beat over which they could cut in other rhythms off records.
While all these mixes created a buzz around the Coldcut name, it was their (official) remix of Eric B and Rakim's 'Paid in Full' which really broke the Coldcut name.
"I think with 'Paid in Full' we contributed to a substantial change in attitude towards remixing", Black claims. "From then on, a remix could be very different from the original, could be creative and take things a step further in its own right. People who could do those kind of remixes were in demand.
"It was from about that time that remixers started to be in a position to ask for points on a remix. We didn't get any points on 'Paid in Full', we got £750. Yet I think we can say that we made that record. It was a hit all over the world."
Eric B and Rakim subsequently signed to MCA for a reported advance of eight hundred grand; no wonder Black and More subsequently released a 'Not Paid Enough' mix. However, the money from 'Paid in Full' did help them to acquire a Casio FZ1 sampler. Still without a sequencer, they used the RZ1 via MIDI to trigger looped one-bar breaks sampled into the FZ1 - a hi-tech equivalent of the pause-button technique. Whereas previously they had used the SL1200's pitch-slider to manually get rhythms on record to sync up with the RZ1, they now had to fine-tune the pitch of their samples on the FZ1. Where they were using a pitched sample as opposed to a rhythm, and needed to keep the sample in key, they passed it to tape via the pitch-shifting facility of a Yamaha SPX90II and then resampled it. Ah, there's nothing to beat ingenuity.
TODAY THE COLDCUT programming suite sports, alongside the inevitable two Technics decks, disco mixer and racks of records (a small part of the Coldcut collection) an interesting mixture of old and new musical technology. In addition to Casio's RZ1 drum machine and FZ1 sampler, the new is represented by a Yamaha DD5 Electronic Percussion Set (which, at under £100, Black calls "a budget alternative to the Octapad"), Nomad SMPTE/MIDI synchroniser, and Atari 1040ST running C-Lab's Creator sequencing software (now the heart of the duo's programming system). The old, meanwhile, is represented by Korg MS10 and MS20 synths, Moog Minimoog and Roland MC202 synths running off Creator via Roland's MPU101 MIDI/CV box, and the inescapable Roland TB303 Bassline - which, it transpires, doesn't get as much use as its currently hip status suggest.
"The bassline on 'Doctorin' the House', which was an early acid-type bassline, was programmed on an MC202," Black reveals. "We do most of our bass sounds on the MC202 - although we've also used the Minimoog - and the bass on 'Stop This Crazy Thing' is a sample off the MS10. In fact we've hardly used the TB303; almost all our acid stuff has been done on the 202. The joke is that you can still get 202s really cheap, but we had to pay £120 for the 303 and we were lucky to find it.
"Years ago I had the choice of buying a 303 or a 202, and I got the 202 because you could do a lot more with it. Also, I don't think the filter on the Bassline is all that good, but the 202's filter is excellent."
Nonetheless, Groove Electronics are producing a custom version of their MIDI2CV box for Coldcut which, in addition to allowing them to hook their Korg synths into the world of MIDI, will include a DIN sync output for the 303. It seems that old synths are definitely In as far as Black and More are concerned, not only for the quality of their sounds hut for their ability to allow real-time timbral manipulation - an in-vogue feature thanks to acid house.
The Bassline was used on Phuture's 'Acid Trax', the seminal acid house record, and in many people's minds it has become synonymous with the acid sound. However, Black maintains "acid isn't really just the Bassline. Acid is any house which is weird. I think we'll be hearing more cheap and cheesy old synthesiser sounds - there are other machines just waiting to be fucked up in some way so that people can get weird sounds out of them."
For 'Doctorin' the House' Coldcut took their next step up the technological ladder, buying their Atari 1040ST and C-Lab Creator the day before going into the studio, and learning how to use the system in an evening.
"At that time all the drum programs were in the RZ1", Black recalls, "so I played them from the RZ1 into the individual sequences on Creator, and used the sequencer's Arrange mode to recreate the drum track."
But they ran into problems when it came to using SMPTE. They'd asked the studio for a SMPTE unit which used song position pointers, and what they got was an SRC Friendchip, one of the earliest SMPTE/MIDI synchronisers, which used a system of cue points but not song pointers.
"The manual was probably the worst I've ever seen" Black says grimly. "We vaguely got the SRC working, but we'd get problems like it would be half a bar out when it picked up the tape position, or it would go out of time when it got to one of the cue points, so we'd have to try nudging that cue point up. I reckon it cost us three days of 24-track studio time, not to mention all the stress."
Scratch & Snatch (Coldcut) |
What's That Noise? (Coldcut) |
Digital Anarchy (Hex) |
Interview by Simon Trask
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