Ninja Tune at 25: Coldcut’s Matt Black Looks Back
The groundbreaking DJ, producer and label co-founder digs deep into the history of the pioneering U.K. electronic music powerhouse
As many old folks will tell you, during the pre-digital music era there was no “discovery” button. Aside from what was being fed to us via radio or MTV, you just had to peruse your local record stores’ cassette, CD, or vinyl racks hoping that you might find something that looked interesting, trusting that an album’s cover art was indicative of what lied beneath its sleeve. Whether it was Blue Note in 60s or Def Jam in the 80s, the art direction was equally important as the creation of the music itself, as it had to speak to the listener before they heard a single note. U.K. DJ duo Coldcut — Matt Black and Jonathan More — discovered this early on, carving out a striking visual design aesthetic for their Ninja Tune imprint, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this year.
I had been aware of Coldcut as a young man from their blistering “Seven Minutes of Madness Remix” of Eric B & Rakim’s “Paid In Full,” not to mention from work in the early 90s with Lisa Stansfield and Queen Latifah. But it wasn’t until 1997’s Let Us Play that I really took notice of what they were doing, with an arguably perfect album that blended hip-hop, trip-hop, downtempo, and dance music into one long seamlessly cohesive piece of evolving art. A largely instrumental record, Coldcut spoke with their beats, recording a deeply political album that barely uttered a word. Songs like the environmentally conscious “Pan Opticon” and “Timber” sampled the cries of protesters and the sounds of trees being cut down into an oddly seductive musical arrangement. The rap sampled “bomb” mentioned on “Atomic Moog 2000” isn’t used in a Kriss Kross-like metaphorical-sense, but in a literal one, as they were preaching nuclear disarmament at 140 beats per minute. Later on the record, Dead Kennedy’s Jello Biafra delivers one of only two vocal performances on the album, with a sequel to his appearance on Ice-T’s “Shut Up! Be Happy.” On the scarily prophetic “Every Home a Prison,” Biafra predicts today’s issues, such as police killings of Black teenagers, mass incarceration, martial law, and the widening gap between the rich and poor.
Let Us Play was Coldcut’s fourth album, but first official LP for Ninja Tune, following a series of releases they had done under other aliases to distance themselves from their major label past. It had only caught my eye because of its stunning album art, emblazoned with a tiny Ninja throwing records like shurikens. The cover design featured a toy box that was almost a physical representation of their style of production, which oft found them tossing different “beats and pieces” of sampled music into a blender, only to be told “I’m sorry, this just isn’t music.” They’d later name their publishing company that.
Over the course of the next 25 years, the label would branch out and sign new artists, creating a tight knit family of like-minded individuals, such as Bonobo, The Cinematic Orchestra, Amon Tobin, and the Herbaliser, all of whom would build upon Coldcut’s blueprint, each with a unique take on the sound. Further down the line, the label would launch several sub-divisions, such as Big Dada, where current super-producer Diplo would release his first album, as well as Brainfeeder, the label imprint of experimental jazz / hip-hop producer Flying Lotus. Cuepoint spoke to Ninja Tune co-founder — Coldcut’s Matt Black — about the past, present, and future of this pioneering independent stronghold.
Cuepoint: I guess we should start talking about the early years of Coldcut and how Ninja Tune came together.
Matt Black: Jon and I have been working together for about 29 years now. We put out our first record as Coldcut in 1987, January. It was called “Say Kids, What Time Is It?” We pretended that it came from America, because U.K. records weren’t taken seriously in the U.K. We made it sort of a “rare item” by selling it for 15 pounds a copy, instead of the normal 3 or 4 pounds. We found that we could actually sell records ourselves.
We got involved with a label called Big Life and we had some quite successful pop records with Yazz and Lisa Stansfield and so on. Eventually that led to the sort of record contract where the pressure was on to produce some more hits. Jon and I didn’t really like that, so what we thought we’d do was invent an alias, a stealthy, alternative identity. It was something we had already done, we’d used various aliases alread — Floormaster Squeeze was like an imaginary character that we’d like to credit things to sometimes. The hip-hop and house pioneers — the house artists particularly — used a lot of aliases. We thought we’d have another alias and start a new label called Ninja Tune. That way we could release music that we wanted to release, rather than having to release the next big pop hit as Coldcut. So that’s what we did.
That’s why we saw Ninja Tune as our Technicolored escape pod from the sausage machine swamp of the music business, where we’d signed some contracts that really limited what we wanted to do and didn’t fit. We wanted to be free of any levels of expectation or production of product. We were still into experimentation music. So those were the sort of founding values for Ninja Tune. Having been on the receiving end of the record company machine, having gone through it, one doesn’t want to get too precious about being an artist. A lot of artists do get quite brutalized by that process and it can stop you from making music. It nearly stopped us from making music, so we thought if we have any other artists on the label, we’ll try to treat them in a fair way — like we would want to be treated ourselves — with accounts, clearly and fairly. We’d split everything 50/50 and as fair as possible and we’ll let the artists use their intuitions to decide how to play things. So those are some of the founding values of Ninja Tune. We started to attract an interesting, oddball bunch of artists and other people who were into hip-hop based, experimental music, and also some of those ideas of an alternative way to do things, and being independent.
And the Solid Steel radio show was previous to the formation of Ninja Tune, is that right?
That’s correct. When I came back from living in Spain, just before I started Coldcut and met Jonathan. He already had a show on the pirate station called KISS FM. It was a London pirate station modeled after the New York one. It was really a London, sort of black music station that wasn’t catered for the mainstream. Jon got me on and my demo was “Say Kids What Time Is It?” This guy, Gordon Mac, who was the main guy, liked it and gave me a shot as well. Then afterward, Jon and I joined forces and started to do a joint show called Solid Steel.
Let’s talk about the early origins of the DJ Food albums. This was kind of a floating alias for a few different folks, is that correct?
Well initially it was just Jon and me. The DJ Food Jazz Brakes they were really the start of the label. Even though Bogus Order Zen Brakes was the first record, the DJ Food ones were the first one to give the label an identity. We sort of carved out this area of experimental, instrumental, dubby hip-hop. That just sort of something that was sort of the right thing at the right time. DJ Food was a Coldcut alias. It came out of the design to give “food” to DJs, because Jon and I used to collect all of the DJ breakbeat records and DJ tools that were out there, as well as all of the mixes from people like Double Dee and Steinski. There was really few of these records and they were difficult to get, so it was a nice kind of collector’s thing. That was really how a DJ could add to their armory, was by having special DJ records. So DJ Food was intended to be part of that.
Yeah, I remember seeing those records back then and thinking, “Is this a guy, or this literally food for the turntables,” so you just answered that.
Well you were supposed to ask yourself question, so the answer was “both.” But later on, this wonderful chap, Patrick Carpenter — PC — came to work with us. We sort of took him on and he was a really good scratch artist, good DJ and a good music head. So was he kind of a young DJ Food apprentice and he became a part of the sound. I think “Dark Lady,” was our best known (DJ Food) track, which was largely a Patrick creation. Later on, Patrick went to Africa for a while to build a hospital there, wonderful chap that he is. Then we met this guy Strictly Kev, introduced by Mixmaster Morris, who is one of my best friends and an incredible, international diplomat, connector and DJ of music. So [Morris] turned us on to Telepathic Fish, and one of them was Strictly Kev. He came to work with us as DJ Food, and he also became Ninja Tune’s graphic designer, taking over from my best friend Mark Porter, who I was at university with. And Mark, completely self-taught, has become one of the world’s top graphic designers. He did the big redesign of The Guardian newspaper, which was a big deal a couple of years ago.
So basically, the original people of Ninja Tune were a bunch of mates from college and that’s how it started, friends from college, into music, having parties, getting high. The way that it had joined us together as a group was something really special. A lot of the ideas of Coldcut and Ninja Tune had come out of that group of friends, as, indeed, we were influenced by On-U Sound, which in some ways was a forerunner of Ninja Tune. [It was] a sort of strongly independent U.K., experimental label with a strong identity, and that’s of course Adrian Sherwood, whose studio I am speaking to you from. So that’s how things roll around eventually.
You had really incredible art direction with that carved out a strong brand identity for the label. Tell me about how you guys came to envision the look of Ninja Tune, from the Let Us Play album cover to the Ninja logo.
Well, I kind of told you. From Coldcut’s first records have a certain sensibility, because Jon went to art college and my dad’s an artist, so I guess we just grew up with a sort of helpful culture of graphics going with music. Of course in those days, album sleeves were a huge, big thing. On-U Sound again had a very strong graphic identity. So we were into it. Mark Porter was the one who was really the one who was into typography and design, and he did start off the identity of the label. And even though Kev came in changed a lot, it still built on what Mark had originally done. Right from the beginning, we had a really good graphic identity. But in terms of designing that, it’s all about having some friends that are really into what you’re doing, and letting them express themselves, enjoying what you’re doing. That’s how it worked.
I think that labels that came later on the hip-hop side like Def Jux or Stones Throw definitely pulled from your influence of pairing strong artwork and a brand identity from what you guys were doing.
Yeah. Well, we weren’t exactly the first to do it, but I think we did it quite well. That’s been a big part of our success actually, so that’s respect to Strictly and Mark Porter, really.
Yeah, when you are a 19 year old kid in a record store — with no digital music back then — when you see something like the Let Us Play album cover, you go “Hmm, this looks like it's talking to me.”
Yeah. The Let Us Play one is quite interesting because that was also collaboration with a bunch of people I was working with, like Stuart Warren-Hill who went on to form Hexstatic. Hex was also a Coldcut multimedia research lab and playground at the time. Robert Pepperell was the guy I worked with closely with then. We used to have a great laugh doing things like building the interactive software for the Let Us Play album. His input was big into that. But Kev’s the sort of designer who could really scoop in what our inspirations and interests were, and he sort of scooped that together and illustrated it really, really well.
I can’t say that it is completely credited to the label, but you guys had a pretty big role in helping introduce the downtempo, trip-hop sound that was gaining popularity from 1994–97. Can you talk about that a little?
Yeah, it goes back to what I was saying. We started experimenting with instrumental hip-hop. It’s something we had been doing right from the beginning; that’s what the first Coldcut records were, really. “That Greedy Beat,” for instance. There were some really good beats, some sample grooves, and some samples on top. And that was a technique that worked. We loved hip-hop and we loved rap. But being the U.K., there was a real shortage of good rappers. There were people trying to do it, but sadly, a lot of them were just trying to imitate the Americans, even to the extent of having fake American accents, which just always sounded pretty wack. There were only a few exceptional people that didn’t fall into that trap. We worked with some guys called Bass Incorporated from North London, who I felt were very authentic. Actually, Black Radical from Bass Incorporated was kind of the unrecognized U.K. equivalent of Chuck D. He was a very articulate and strong rapper with certain mindbending, psychedelic lyrics. I absolutely loved his stuff. We made a couple of records with them.
But failing to have good vocalists from the U.K., we started jazzing it up with samples, creating different types of interest using samples to put different layers over the beats. I remember walking around London with a Walkman cassette and I was just listening to two-minute loops of grooves and drum breaks and thinking “This is going to be the future of listening!” (Laughs). Just tiny little snatches. I was just enjoying it as a listener. There are a number of reasons why that music got successful. I think there was a reaction against house music and fast dance music was a bit wack. It wasn’t really a chilled out, smokers’ music. It was founded on the ecstasy thing. So there was a strong association with blunted beats and Ninja Tune and that sort of thing in the 90s. I suppose in a way, we encouraged that. But there was also the development of chill out, which came out around that time. Not everyone wanted to be in the main room, all the time, off their tits, bouncing up and down like a pneumatic drill. Some people wanted to chill out, they wanted to dance more slowly, groove out, or they wanted to just sit down and talk with their friends. So that sort of music was being played in the chill out room. Then there was the development of ambient, and that was kind of part of the same thing, with people like Mixmaster Morris and The Orb. So we were sort of the hip-hop equivalent of The Orb, if you like.
Yeah, I love that. It was clear that you had your roots in hip-hop and house music, and then the label in general, started to bring in all of these other sounds like acid jazz, breakbeats and all these things. And that’s really true to the blueprint of what Coldcut is. So how do you make all of these things fit together seamlessly for the Ninja Tune brand? Essentially you are taking several different, like-minded individuals, but they all kind of have a different sound. You can’t really peg a Ninja Tune artist and be like “he’s this genre,” there’s a lot of different things going on.
Well, you’re talking about “ingredient X,” but either it doesn’t work or it just works. Thelonious Monk said this wonderful thing, “Everyone is a genius at being themselves.” And I really believe that. The people that are on Ninja Tune, the artists that we’ve attracted in the early days, people like 9 Lazy 9’s James Braddell, he’s a real fucking character that guy, if you knew his story. Kid Koala, Mix Master Morris, Strictly Kev, Mr. Scruff, Amon Tobin, Bonobo, and Jason Swinsco from Cinematic Orchestra, we’re all oddballs. I define a “star” as someone who’s been able to negotiate their neurosis into a marketable character. That could apply to any artist, really.
So it’s a family of oddballs who’ve each got their own story. But it goes beyond the love of hip-hop and wanting to fuck around with music. There’s a certain “outsider” thing there. But as a label, which has become a family or tribal group, there’s inclusiveness in that we’re all weirdoes (laughs). But people ask me all the time, what’s it take to be on Ninja Tune, what sort of people do you sign. Our artists have got each a unique character — which we all have, if we can discover it — and that’s manifested in their music and what they do. To me that’s a Ninja.
And how are you discovering all of these artists? You have such a great legacy of all these unique producers. Where are you finding these guys?
Each one is different, each one comes in their own way. That sounds pretty Zen-like, but it’s kind of like that. We have signed people because of demos, we have signed people because they are people that we already know, people that work in the office, fans, artists, and we’ve found them by accident. All those parts can work, it’s really just a matter of being awake and receptive. We’ve been going for a while and we mean something, so I think people respect that and it’s attractive and they want to be with us.
[They are] people that have the mentality that perhaps it’s more important to sell 100,000 records and make something that you believe in and is the record that you want to make, than make some piece of cheese that sells a million copies. Having said that, Ninja Tune is still only in business because we take a good solid grip of the business side as well, otherwise we would not be in business now. For which I have to credit the staff and Peter Quicke, who actually runs the label now. Jon and I have a pretty cushy number being Coldcut and chilling out a bit more, doing the music side, which is a really fun part of the business. A lot of it is really fucking hard work, especially keeping going in these hard, hard, hard times. Which will bring us to that part of your question, I imagine you want to know about (Iaughs).
You know that question is in here (laughs)! Well before we go there, let me ask, and I hate to keep going back to Let Us Play, but it’s my favorite Ninja Tune record. You take a song like “More Beats and Pieces,” which kind of has that Steinski cut-and-paste approach to it, or like Public Enemy, since you mentioned Chuck D earlier, with an approach where you are taking numerous sources of music to make a track. The way the business has changed with sampling laws, is it possible to still make music with that approach, or is that a dead art?
No, I don’t think it’s dead at all. I think actually, it’s almost too alive for its own good. Far from it being a desolate landscape of lawsuits and desperation, a framework has emerged whereby it’s possible to legally clear samples quite easily. If you’re going use a big piece of someone else’s record, that’s what you should do. Because otherwise, if you have a big hit with it and it gets used on some advert — and this has happened to Ninja Tune — the rights holders come after you and say “You didn’t get clearance, it’s your ass, we want 10 percent, you’re fucked.” So its much better to coolly negotiate those rights in the first place. There are now mechanisms and defaults, understandings for doing that, which makes life a lot easier. In fact, it’s like never before, where the whole history of music is your scrapbook. If you want to just fuck around with it and make a fun mash-up of some kind for you and your friends, brilliant. If it goes any further than that, you probably do want to start getting clearance, and hopefully you’ll have a hit and everyone will earn money. It’s happened time and time again, so I think mash-up and sampling are alive and well.
I agree with that. Let me just play devil’s advocate though, when you have a record that samples 50 records, is that impossible to do now? Something like a “More Beats & Pieces” song, where you are pulling from numerous sources. Is it more trouble than its worth to go and clear those?
Yeah, I guess. You’re going to have to have 50 different conversations with 50 different rights holders, so that might be quite frustrating and expensive. But if it’s got 50 records in it, it’s a mash-up, it’s an art piece. It’s not going to be a commercial record. You should just do it as an art piece and regard it as that and not try to make money on it. You can’t have your cake and eat it. Fair use, if you just do something for fun and you don’t sell it, no one can say anything to you. If you make something and earn a lot of money from it, then people who have contributed to it are going to be entitled some of that money. That is fair overall, I would say.
This reminds me of your Journeys By DJ album, if I recall when it came out, people were saying it was “the greatest mix of all time.”
Yeah, a lot of people have said it is the best mix CD.
But that probably had a lot of clearances there, right?
That is right. Hilariously on that, there were two tracks we couldn’t license. One was a left field track, so we used “If There Was No Gravity” by Air Liquide. It worked out really well, because now Dr. Walker and Air Liquide is now a very good friend of mine, which worked out great. The other track they wouldn’t let us use was our own track, “People Hold On,” with Lisa Stansfield. Fucking Arista wouldn’t let us license our own track for our own mix CD! It was a wicked mix with the Moody Boys’ “Got To Be Free,” as well. Absolutely a fine moment, but you just work around it.
People often ask us why we haven’t done anything since Journeys by DJ and we sort of felt that we couldn’t top that for a while. We kind of made our definitive statement about it, but I did do a mix last year that I’m really pleased with, which is up on Mixcloud and is called Coldcut Presents 2 Hours of Sanity: Love Mix. I tried to make something really multi-threaded and next level. It’s very different than Journeys by DJ, but perhaps you will enjoy it. I’m pleased with that as a piece of work, which I don’t say that often.
Let’s touch upon The Heavy’s album and “How You Like Me Now.” Things have really come full circle, as you have essentially a funk record on the label, with that genre being a backbone for a lot of samples that both Coldcut and Ninja Tune were inspired by.
Yeah, that’s a really good point, I hadn’t quite thought about it like that. But it’s great to have a funk/rock band like The Heavy on the label, playing live, active music, that is inspired by the funk and breakbeats that started off Ninja Tune in the first place and is still quite possibly my favorite type of music ever. They also have a useful knack for making some very catchy songs, which has been a huge asset to us (laughs). So long may they rock. I really like the lead vocalist, Kelvin. The style is excellent and they just make a really good racket. You can’t argue with “How You Like Me Now,” can you?
No you can’t. It’s amazing.
David Letterman putting that on his show was a huge, lucky break. You can’t script breaks like that, but if you keep doing the best you can and you keep pushing, eventually you get lucky breaks. You can’t really predict where they’ll be, which is part of the fun of the game, really.
Yeah, I thought I even saw it in a couple of car commercials or something out here.
Yep, I’m sure you did. That’s their decision. There’s a good example. A few years ago, Coldcut licensed a track to Ford. We didn’t know whether to do it or not. We asked Greenpeace’s advice and they said “Yeah, do it, and give half of the money to our campaign against Ford.” So we thought “Okay, that sounds like a good workaround.” We caught a lot of shit about it, rightly so, because it was the wrong decision to license that track to them. My sister is sort of like an Eco Buddhist, and she likes this woman Joanna Macy, who said that “Contentment is a radical state.” I like that. And I like the idea that adverts are one of the prime forces fighting against contentment. Conversely, they increase desire of things which we don’t really need and they want you to be not content until you’ve bought this next thing. In that world, I find car ads the lowest of the low. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a good car ad, they’re just pathetic. So I made a decision, no more car ads. So Jonathan and I agreed that between us, Coldcut won’t do a car ad. But Ninja Tune is an artist based label, we’ve always had that as sort of our pillar of our faith, our principles. So if an artist gets an offer for their song in a car ad, we’d not tell them “No, you can’t do this.” It’s up to the artist. That’s quite a good example of how sometimes we have to let go and let something be, if you really do respect the idea that other people’s ideas are as valuable as your own.
So the big question is, how has the digital music frontier changed the business of Ninja Tune? What is the secret to sticking around for 25 years, especially when ten years ago we saw a lot of these indie labels fold because they weren’t ready for this new revolution.
I think it’s a few basic things. You have to have good people. Like really good people, who are into it primarily for the same passion you are. You share that common ground for music passion and that’s a solid place to stand on. You also have to be adaptable and quick thinking and you have to evolve, otherwise you get crushed by change. We must have been fairly good at evolving and adapting, otherwise we wouldn’t be here. I do want to put in that Peter Quicke and the staff’s hard work are what kept the label going all this time. When I look over other people’s shoulders at what they are working on on their computers, I can’t even fucking understand it. The complexity of it is beyond me. It’s gotten quite complicated now, when we started off with just two guys and 500 12”’s in the van. But I think I’ve been able to be some use to the label by being a futurist. My speciality is predicting the future. I got us on computers in 1988. Using desktop publishing, I got us on the internet in the early 90s. I built our first website, because I could see the way things were going. We were quite early onto this thing, with the idea of interactive software and video games being a natural adjunct to electronic music. Basically, keep innovating artistically and keep playing the music business game. It’s a funky game where the quick thinking and swift footed small mammal can out maneuver the great crushing major label parasite dinosaur.
That leads to the next question, as a futurist, where do you see things going next, as far as where the music is going, or what role technology plays in the industry later down the line?
It’s a huge question. If could just recap quickly, we started doing netcasts in the 90s and we were fairly early on getting our store up so we could sell digital downloads. Apple did provide a significant income to us through iTunes downloads for quite the last few years. They get a lot of flack sometimes, but I don’t think their music business actually earns them a lot of money. I think it sells their hardware. But for music sales, for us as a label, it’s very important. Our income from iTunes downloads was about 20%-30% of our income at one time. Broadly our income divvies up like this. About a third from solid product — CDs and vinyl — and about a third from digital formats, which used to be all digital downloads, but now includes streaming. Actually I think our income from Spotify overtook our income from iTunes for the first time in the last month. Then a third is from sync, licensing our music for synchronization, for video games, films, TV. Those are the three main sources of income we have. We also have our own management company, which adds to the holistic nature of the business, and we also have our own publishing company, so those figures I’ve given you include publishing as well. The publishing company is called “Just Isn’t Music” that Jonathan and I set that up at the same time we set up our original record label.
I’m personally interested in alternatives to the monolithic corporations’ control of the music business. I think it’s possible for people to build an alternative platform which is much fairer and works much more closely between fans and artists. I think you can build blockchain-powered smart contract systems that can greatly increase the capability to provide an alternative to the big companies, which shall remain nameless because we have valued business relationships with them as well. Nowadays you just have to make sure that you have good relationships with everyone as far as principle.
Check out Whitestone.Io. This is a young friend of mine called Roey, whom I like what he’s doing, so I’m helping a bit with that. Another company I really like are Synereo.com. They’re doing what I’ve been wanting to do for ages, which is build a social network which is owned by the users. Perhaps music business would be a great place to start off with. So those are the things that I am working on at the moment to get fairer and better platforms for music. Stop moaning about how it is destroyed and just get on and build an alternative ourselves. Some people say nobody will be interested, they are happy with the major providers. But we reckon that there has always been the major distributors and the mass market, and then there’s always been an alternative to that, for people prepared to look a little bit harder for something they can really get into more deeply.
I’m curious what your thoughts are on the electronic dance music explosion, which is different than what you’ve been doing at Ninja, but still an offshoot of house music which you also have some roots in.
Sure, electronic music isn’t a style really, it’s a set of techniques. So when people talk about EDM, they sort of forget that. So really, EDM can be anything. But as a style, I like Skrillex actually. I supported him at a gig just before he got famous, before he blew up, and I thought “the kids are going to love this, it’s a really fucking exciting sound.” That scene and that sound fell pretty quickly and took a narrow straight-jacket, but I do think it’s great that American youth are finally got off their programmed addiction to classic rock as sort of the most important genre of music. They decided “Fuck that, our great grandparents were into that, we want something else that represents our lives and our environment more.” Of course the environment now is technology and electronics and enormous information and enormous commotion, so they found that in EDM. For every 100 kids that get into Skrillex, there will be at least one that wants something a little bit different, that wants the alternative, the rebelliousness, but doesn’t just settle for the mainstream interpretation of that. They start scratching the surface a little bit deeper and then they come to labels like us.
I think the same can be said for the hip-hop explosion of 25–30 years ago. A lot of people came in through the MC Hammers and that kind of thing and then stumbled upon Public Enemy.
Exactly, we represent that section of the slightly more discriminating, restless music lover. I think we can continue representing that, because that alternative never goes away, it’s always changing. We’re doing great, we have ODESZA at the moment, who are doing great in America, which is kind of thinking people’s EDM, intelligent peoples’ EDM/pop. I saw them do their show in Amsterdam. Really good show, great visuals from a mate of theirs. Sold out, people we’re loving it. I think they’re doing really well. That’s a kind of new Ninja. They’re third generation Ninjas and they’re doing really well. I think we’re getting better at upgrading to the 21st century. I think we did very well at the end of the 20th century in the 90s, that was a big Ninja time, but then I think we had a bit of a lull after that. I don’t think we ever put out any shit records, I think every record that we’ve put out has had something special about it. But now I think we are fine tuning the Ninja nose even better and putting out even better music now than we were a few years ago.
Yeah, I think you can see that, with you guys picking up Run The Jewels for the U.K. and obviously stuff like Flying Lotus, who recently just did some things on Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly. It’s all very relevant to what the scene has been talking about.
That’s right. Doing [Flying Lotus’ label] Brainfeeder has been great as well. Jon and I have been working on our Coldcut album in L.A. and just being in that scene has been really great.
And my last question, you mentioned that you guys are working on a new Coldcut album. What can you tell us about that?
I can tell you it’s been since 2006, the last one (laughs). We are working on it and reckon it is 80% finished. I can’t tell you a lot more, because I don’t want to say it’s going to be out at X time, because I’ve said that before and we’ve not been able to keep to it. But we are working on making something as good as we possibly can, otherwise there is no point in cranking the wheel and churning out the same thing as before. We’re trying to still sharpen our edge and take people into new sonic, and that’s taking time, but we’re fully on the case and will never surrender.
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