"My speciality is predicting the future," declared Matt Black, the louder, more opinionated half of Coldcut. "The world's about to become a lot more dangerous. The choices that we and our children are going to have to make about things like cloning are going to become more and more difficult. People have no idea. They think it's science fiction." He shook his head with the spiny, impatient intelligence of Richard Dawkins. "I'm actually going to get a sample of my DNA taken as soon as possible and frozen so I can be cloned again in 1,500 years time. I quite fancy living for ever."
Further down the sofa, his bandmate Jonathan More vehemently shook his head in a manner that suggested he has heard this idea before and doesn't like it one bit. "A cardboard box at the end of the garden for me," he said.
Like all the best duos, Coldcut is an odd couple. Black, the younger by four years, is a former computer programmer with a degree in biochemistry. In his long black coat, wide-brimmed hat and rakish scarf he would make an excellent, slightly intimidating Doctor Who.
More, an erstwhile art teacher, has the wardrobe of a country gent and a fondness for amiable, rambling metaphors. "Coldcut's a reasonably good vehicle," he pondered. "I might pop out for the odd walk about from time to time, explore the lay-bys, but I don't need to get another vehicle."
British dance music's most dogged survivors met over the counter of the niche retail outlet Reckless Records in London in 1986: More was working there. Black brought in a tape he was making for a competition for London's Capital Radio, and the resulting track, Say Kids, What Time Is It?, became their first single. They were briefly Top of the Pops regulars, manning the samplers behind Yazz and Lisa Stansfield and popularizing sample-based music. Their radical cut-up of Eric B and Rakim's Paid in Full was a landmark remix and their 1996 Journeys By DJ compi-lation remains the standard by which all DJ mix albums are judged. More recently, they have developed audiovisual mixing software such as VJamm. Considering all the mix albums, remixes, soundtracks, collaborations and art projects, it's not surprising that their new album, Sound Mirrors, is only their fourth.
"What's good about being Coldcut is we don't have to be part of the normal music-business sausage machine," Black said. "Album, tour, album, tour, greatest hits, die. This is our 19th year in the business, which, in dance music, is an eternity."
Black and More are installed in a room above the bustling offices of their record label, Ninja Tune, whose walls are papered with posters advertising such signings as Mr. Scruff and Roots Manuva.
Their old nerve center by the river Thames, they glumly reported, now houses luxury maisonettes and a branch of Starbucks. And there have been other sea changes in Coldcut's world in the past few years. When they released their last album, 1997's Let Us Play, Black was prone to saying things like, "It's not that we're brilliant, it's just that everyone else is crap," and comparing the fuss over superstar DJs to honoring "the best hamburger griller in McDonald's." In retrospect, he wasn't far wrong as 1997 was the end of dance music's imperial phase, that period when fantastic new ideas seemed to bloom every week. It has never been as culturally relevant since.
More has a metaphor for it. "When I was at art college I learned about Picasso but I didn't appreciate his work at the time because he'd been photocopied so many times that the quality degraded from his beautiful painting to a couple of licks of paint on a shit, made-in-Thailand piece of junk. That's what happens with a lot of different things. It starts, it's interesting, lots more people get on board, it gets exciting and then it all goes wrong."
PHOTO COURTESY OF COLDCUT
Black, typically, prefers a scientific diagnosis. "I think it ran out of bpm (beats per minute). The range of dance music is 60bpm to 200bpm, which is pretty much the range of the human heartbeat. After 200bpm your heart blows up. It's like in fashion -- the length of skirts from the microskirt to the one that trails a few meters behind you. There aren't going to be any more innovations in skirt length."
Electronic music will be vital again, Coldcut said, when another generation discovers and reinterprets it. Until then, Black and More have decided that the way forward is songs. In the early 1990s they turned to abstract instrumentals, pioneering the sound that they playfully dubbed "funkjazztical tricknology" and everybody else called trip-hop. Now that music-making software has become so accessible, the challenge has gone out of it. Hence Sound Mirrors' ambitiously expansive remit -- bellicose rap-rock, frazzled electro-blues, paranoid rave -- and myriad vocalists, including Roots Manuva and Soweto Kinch.
"Check It Out Now the Funk Soul Brother was never going to compete with Honky Tonk Woman," said Black. "For a moment, yes, but not long-term. You will come back to songs that you can sing." He has a formula. "When you're bringing things to people, 60 percent that they can deal with and 40 percent new is about the right ratio."
Coldcut is nothing if not adaptable. Black and More became British dance music's first pop stars back when nobody was making much money out of it. Black lost his place on a government employment scheme when he missed a meeting to appear on Top of the Pops. When their major-label deal went sour, they founded the below-the-radar Ninja Tune, inspired by their trips to Japan.
"Our manager Jazz Summers said to me that we'd never make a record as good as People Hold On (with Lisa Stansfield)," More said.
"And I think we have. I've always kept that as a guiding force: the ninja art of turning around things like that and using it as an energy to drive you." That attitude produced their much-admired club night Stealth and the Journeys By DJ album. "We thought, `Right, we'll fucking show them,''' Black recalled. "And we did."
In the years between albums they have had, as Black put it, "many pies in the oven." They're surely the only act in the world whose collaborators include Steve Reich, Radiohead, Hari Kunzru and the British Antarctic Survey. For the 2001 election, they produced an audiovisual cut-up of political footage called Revolution. Three years later, they posted samples on an activist Web site and invited members of the public to help make a US equivalent. "I've got Mrs. Thatcher to thank for politicizing me," beamed More, who has a collection of 1980s protest memorabilia and grows misty-eyed at the mention of important industrial disputes of the day.
I wonder if they ever feel nostalgic for the unbottled excitement and dizzying potential of dance music's infancy. More does, a little, but Black is resolute. "I don't. I'm not losing my edge at all. I'm more able, capable and happier right now and I still feel we can do our best work. We're not running out of ideas. Time," he conceded with a grin, "we might run out of."
Ah, but then there's always cloning.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist