by RAF KATIGBAK

Matt Black and Jonathan More, known together as Coldcut, have a few reasons to pop their collar, from pioneering the idea of an artist-run, independent electronic-music label (Ninja Tune) and helping introduce the cut ’n’ paste style of early hip hop into the VJ world (and developing software for it) to having interactive sound installations at the Centre Pompidou and consistently producing amazing mix albums—never to mention brilliant original work of their own? And all the while, remaining fiercely independent and outspoken politically?

Their latest effort, Sound Mirrors, continues where their last album, 1996’s Let Us Play left off, albeit with greater subtlety in the politics and a stronger focus on songcraft. In fact, dissent never sounded so good.

Mirror: Coldcut is one of the few political dance music acts to survive the ’90s. Why is that?

Jonathan More: Being political is just natural for me. Matt and I were brought up on Fela Kuti, Gil Scott Heron, [Sun Ra’s] Arkestra, James Brown and so on, who all had their commercial moments, but also had a lot of politics that ran through their music. I think it’s interesting, right now, that it’s harder to get a political record out to the mass media, as it were, than it is to get a record about shooting people and having oral sex or drinking champagne. I find it odd that there could be records like that on daytime radio, yet something that has a slightly political edge can get completely masked.

M: What about that Green Day album? Is it great, or just another instance of mainstream co-opting the rhetoric of revolution?

JM: Well, action speaks louder than words. I heard Green Day on the radio and saw the video, and thought it was a really good Clash song. I’m impressed it worked its way through the undercurrent. If they’ve got shitloads of links on their Web site, and go and play gigs that are kind of meant to help empower people to vote, then that’s all good. Engagement, that’s where I’m at these days. The days of sitting in your armchair saying, well, that’s wrong and that’s wrong, are over. Taking your bottles down to the bottle bank, not eating as much meat as you used to, is all well and good, but there’s got to be a bit more to it in some respect.

M: I guess we’re past the point when you can spend a few hours producing one of those cut ’n’ paste scratch-video political satires that you and acts like EBN pioneered, post it on the Web and then call yourself an activist. Those things are kinda played out, anyway.

JM: These things happen. Look at Picasso and his work—when I first went to art college, I didn’t like his stuff at all, but when I got to know it properly, I really understood. He was so influential that those kind of squiggles, shapes and shit were all over everything in my childhood. I couldn’t deal with it because they’ve been sort of usurped by the mass market, and diluted and become secondary, thirdary, fourthary, fifthary [sic]—really wanky ideas. When I got to know about the original shit and the context, it all started to make sense.

With Kid Koala, Blockhead and DJ Signify at Metropolis on Saturday, May 13, 8 p.m., $27.50

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