by Laz
Visit the Peace Corps Stage House in Bamako, Mali, and on top of a meager Sony portable, covered with bits of mud and splattered mosquitoes, lies an Ikon Productions compilation.

On it are such classics as Thompson Twins' "You Take Me Up" and Black Box's "Ride on Time," all of which remind the 20 or so volunteers 6000 miles away from the comforts of America that there is, in fact, a place they know as "home," even if it takes a month to get a package of Skittles from there. The well-worn tape is one of many, like Duran Duran's Rio and Tori Amos' In the Pink, that the PCVs play daily for a dose of sanity, something musically familiar from their past that soothes frazzled nerves pushed to the edge by living Third World. If it weren't for these simple pleasures, the Peace Corps just might fall apart.

One of the classic cuts on the Ikon tape is none other than Coldcut's 1989 collaboration with Yazz, "Doctorin' the House," and each time it plays, some fool volunteer gets that yearning for a proper danceclub that the closest West African equivalent, a Lebanese joint called Byblos, just can't satiate. No one really cares that the track is eight years old.

Obviously, these hardest of hardcore young American diplomats have little idea that Coldcut are not only still around, but have released a new album, Let Us Play, that's riding the crest of a musical trend called Turntablism they'll absorb when they return stateside. Although the PCVs'd never know it, Coldcut's fourth LP bumped up Turntablism a few notches with aesthetic and philosophical convictions as clearly defined as the creative path Coldcut have made for themselves since their earliest production work in the late '80s.

Remember Lisa Stansfield? Most of the volunteers do, and she is who she was because of them; that is, Matt Black and Jonathan Moore, and their penchant for African rhythmic sensibilities that arguably led to the widespread panic of mainstreamed hip-hop at the close of the '80s.

But a decade on, with their own label, the highly successful Ninja Tune, dumping oodles of funky stuff from scads of club artists such as Amon Tobin, the Herbalizer and DJ Vadim, the twosome still dig group projects.

"I think collaborations are something we're interested in to sorta bolster Ninja Tune's international profile, really," notes Matt Black, "like the track we did with Jello Biafra on the album, is an example of that. I think we should get more collaborations with the talent you have over here with what we've got going on in the U.K."

GADZ NO! If that happened, we might get another disarmingly political album like Let Us Play, containing meditations on nukes, club society, deforestation, and that Vincent Price-like Biafra rant. Jon, a former art instructor, addresses with aplomb the notion that their latest is propaganda you can dance to.

"Well, I think it was something that was important to us, and I felt that a lot of dance music was so self-referential to the sounds that it contains, you know, 'I'm a big bassline' or 'I'm a humongous kick' or 'I'm really funky,' and we just thought there should be more content. I'm tired of hearing what we call trip-hop bollocks or techno bollocks, it's just like endless wanking on machines which is quite easy to do, really."

While he admits that Biafra's work with the Dead Kennedys "was, erm, too extreme for me in that direction and I couldn't really deal with it," Jon's quite pleased with the pointedness of Let Us Play, especially with what he and Matt see as a possible function of electronic music: DIY social improvement. Those who see something like the age-based curfews springing up on both sides of the Pond as the beginning of something bad have friends in Coldcut.

"Yeah, that's the vibe, it makes you angry enough to want to do something about it, because it's simply outrageous. We had a long conversation with Jello about what was happening in the UK with the election going on, the Labor and Tory parties vying with each other to see who could lock up the youngest children, who could put the curfew on...basically blaming a lot of the problems on the youth rather than proposing any solution. So we downloaded a lot of sh%t from their election manifestos along with the press that was being whipped about at the time, sent it to Jello with a beat, and he came up with the, uh, rant, I suppose you call it..."

But that's only half the story behind the cheery euphemism that would please any respectable Republican/Tory ("Curfew, it's such a family-oriented word...a much more palatable concept than MARTIAL LAW"); Coldcut created some goodies that will let us all play.

"...and, uh, Jello sent us back the a cappella, and then we created the backing track on a piece of software called Playtime that we developed with Hex, these two guys Rob Pepperell and Miles Visman, and it's basically a random funk generator using an engine that is very very clever, and processing that and editing it together to provide a backing track. We've got the demo version of that software on our CD-ROM that comes with the album which we're giving away free, so you too can make your own rants with your own backing tracks."

Despite harboring the tone of a stoned NPR advertisement, Jon's quite serious about the idea of "non-violent direct action;" quoth the sleeve of Let Us Play: "to us it is a mindf%ck that anyone is to blame for anything or that anything is f%cked." For those dedicated enough to explore either the "read me" files or liner notes, Coldcut include a modicum of information and references on sources for funneling energy into everything from Greenpeace (to which "Atomic Moog 2000" is dedicated) to the Centre for Alternative Technology.

Those picking up Coldcut, breaks and philosophy, for the first time still get the chance to be stealthy from the word "enter" with that specially packaged CD-ROM. Anyone not ready to die for a tree can still use Playtime and Funkit.

The former lets wannabes generate their own music from a load of samples, while the later breaks down "Atomic Moog 2000," "More Beats and Pieces" and "Return to Margin" into virtual dubplates to enable every last idiot to sound like Kid Koala. Potentially.

Much of this activism stems from a deep-seated desire to extinguish what Matt unabashedly terms the "dinosaur forces of rock" from the face of the planet. See, these two share more that just a long string of classics with The Orb; they share a loathing of Big Life Records, and de facto, being fed corporate data to make output. That's the whole point of putting software like Playtime and Funkit into fans hands: "re-boot the system!"

"Well, TV, video and music need to re-mix, and the tools are becoming available so you can do that in your bedroom or your own desktop," drones Jon, although not for long as he's about to soil himself in excitement. "They're there, and we're pointing out to people that you don't have to follow the same old story and you don't have to pay $40,000 to some special video producer to make an expensive video with lots of bums and tits in it. You can do your own tip and you can tightly and intimately synch your music to your picture, which is an entirely fuller effect, really."
Pardon?

"Um, where what you hear is what you see; I suppose that's the ultimate point. On "Timber," for example, the sounds that make up the track and the video are sequenced together, so it's sorta misuse of a video sampling software program and turning it into a combined video and music sequencing software program, and uh, seeing that played on a big screen and seeing people's reactions to it is quite interesting...we did a gig in Barcelona called Sonar Festival, where it was sorta our first experiment in that area of doing synchronized audio and video live, using the computer to randomly load up samples of video pictures with the sound brought into the mix, then using it to slow them down, cut them up."

And...?

"Well, it was interesting. For example, there's a clip we like to use of Matt's baby playing wind chimes, and then turning to the camera and giving it a big grin, you know, and it's a beautiful chord that you happen to hear, and it just fit so well with the backing track at the time, it was totally in tune and just got the most amazing cheer from people, because they'd seen the baby wandering around the festival...it was pretty cool. It's just a test, this, but it's gotta be better than looking at a couple of blokes standing up on some rostrum with a couple of decks...we prefer to provide this option and this route for live performance and for videos than rather following standard practice."

So there it is: Coldcut are "taking the slack option" while relieving record behemoths of their cultural potency by arming a growing band of shadow deck warriors with the likes of reconstituted Zeppelin beats and "Coldcut's A to Z" set of anti-rules and new definitions. One of which should soothe those Peace Corps volunteers when they try to reintegrate into American society... "Africa: The centre of the world." It will remind them, as it does Coldcut, of where they've been, what they've done, and more importantly, of something they should never forget.#

Laz recently visited Africa. His next trip, he informs us, will be to Papua Guinea in search of "some real jungle music, man."

Website hurl by Jon Armstrong @ Damage Control

content ©1997 grid magazine