Room with a hue

>> Stepping into DJ Food's Kaleidoscope with Strictly Kev

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

Ninja Tune's DJ Food, if you'll recall, started as a secret hiding place for Coldcut while they sorted out legal nonsense over their name. It came to incorporate DJs Strictly Kev and PC (Paul Carpenter, not a laptop), and became a toolkit for DJs to reassemble as they wished. Now that Coldcut are Coldcut again, Kev and PC have taken DJ Food in a weird but satisfying new direction, short on whipcrack breaks and long on moody, psychometric textures--a sort of sonic carnival spookhouse, a trompe l'oreille if you will. Strictly Kev gives us the guided tour.

Mirror: Let's talk about Kaleidoscope, which is a real departure from the shoebox-full-of-Lego idea of the early DJ Food stuff.

Strictly Kev: That's a great description, actually. I presume you're talking about every known ingredient and style thrown into the mix, to form a not particularly coherent but quite entertaining compilation.

M: Yeah, something for DJs to put stuff together for the dancefloor with. The new one's more the home-listening experience--headphone food.

SK: That's a very good analogy--food for the head, for the DJ at home or just your normal listener. We didn't narrow scope just for the ones who want the breakbeats.

M: So when you started the album, was it just a few ideas you were pasting together?

SK: Yeah, there was no overall concept, other than us indulging ourselves completely and utterly, because we could. Mainly because it was the first time it was just PC and I, without Coldcut. It was almost like a clean slate, we were very much left to our own devices. We'd been playing out in clubs for years and all we'd heard was club-oriented music, and we didn't want to hear or make that. The thinking behind it was much more subtly expansive pieces, which you can't really fit into a DJ set. It's always been part of our repertoire, though. We'd been buying numerous pieces of vinyl while on tour, collecting a lot of raw material--soundtrack things, jazz, electronics, experimental and spoken word.

Alleys of socks, bubbles of colour

M: Speaking of which, [performance poet] Ken Nordine's on there. I like his stuff because he doesn't have that clichéd spoken-word tone. He has a very genuine voice, and a creative way with words.

SK: My three things for any spoken word are, first of all, the tone of voice, whether it be a rapper, a poet or just a plain TV ad announcer. The second is delivery, and then it's what they're saying. With rappers, you may not understand half of what they're saying, but if the way they say it gets you in the gut, then it doesn't really matter. We got into Nordine's stuff from the Word Jazz series, about 10 years back, and then finally caught up with him when he came to London in '97. He said he really needed a full piece, so we literally wrote the music to "The Ageing Young Rebel" complete, without any notion of what he was going to do with it. He sent me a number of stories, of which I liked that text the best. We sent him the DAT, and he read the piece over it straight. It all fit in perfectly!

M: Good, because the slightest change could throw off the whole meaning of the words.

SK: You should read the Japanese translation, which was retranslated back into English. Lines like "an alley full of socks," and "like a happy bumblebee" instead of "how happy mum'll be." It makes even less sense, but then presumably the Japanese get into it not because they understand it, but because they like the tone and the pitch.

M: I love the packaging for the album, so I have to ask: what exactly is the Colourscape, where the photos were shot?

SK: It's a big, inflatable environment which travels around festivals in Europe. Every room is like a bubble, but connected by a doorway you can step through, and every room is a different colour. I'm not sure how it works--I think it's the sunlight reflecting off the material it's made of--but everything is an intense colour. The red, for instance, is like a darkroom. It's almost like a mist, your eyes really have to readjust for every room. It's an incredibly calming environment because it's soft and round, and there's loads of doorways to go through, and you're almost immersed in this fog of colours. Most of the photos are taken through multiple doorways, going through, so you get all these different colours building up.

M: Sound like a good analogy for the record! :

DJ Food's Strictly Kev, with Notorious W.I.G. and L.U.V., plus bonus Victor Africa, at Jingxi on Sunday, June 4, 10pm, $10