A stealthy appetite

>> Ninja Tune celebrates a decade of feeding heads

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

Those who swear allegiance to the code of the ninja will find the October moon smiling upon them. London-based label Ninja Tune's miscellaneous mix-creants and beat bandits are flocking to town this month--Amon Tobin brings an eerie kind of cool to Cabaret for two nights this week and the Herbaliser blow your allowance at Medley closer to Halloween. Between those engagements is a gig by recently aligned hip hop unit Blackalicious, and a veritable Ninja mini-fest at Ex-Centris, part of the New Film & Media Festival. Burnt Friedman of Flanger (on the N-Tone sublabel) and pixel-whippers Hexstatic are slated, and so are label co-founders Matt Black and Jonathan More, the ninja masters known as Coldcut. Hot damn!

That this year marks Ninja Tune's 10th anniversary, that October is the year's 10th month and that human beings have 10 fingers is best left a sappy accident. Any deeper reading of the signs might lead to freaky Discordian denouements. Not that resurrecting the '70s pop-paranoia pseudo-mythology of Discordianism, or its subsequent follow-up, the Church of the Subgenius, would bother Coldcut's Jonathan More.

"They're sort of mergers of media and collectors of madness," says More, "filters and rebroadcasters. They originated quite a few styles--in particular their radio shows, I loved. Also, they had the whole mystique. Any Subgenius could be the messiah Bob if they wanted to. I love all that stuff, from Marshall McLuhan through Steinski--all contributors to the media."

Bucking the baboon theory

If you combined the psychedelic subversion of Discordianism and Subgenius, the techno-trickery suggested by late-'80s cyberpunk and the righteous rebellion of punk rock, you'd have the spiritual blueprint for Ninja Tune. Musically, Coldcut hail from hip hop's funky variation on William S. Burroughs' cut-and-paste shtick. Ethically, they and their label are driven in reaction to the bad taste their late-'80s involvement with major labels left in their mouths, and by extension, the false profits of corporate culture as a whole.

"I call it 'being aphids on the ant farm,'" says More. "They farm the sugar for the ants. It's a similar sort of thing--you've got all these people around you, being paid enormous sums of money by companies that make stuff, all shouting and screaming, wheeling and dealing. We all do it--this conversation right now is part of it. But there comes a time when people get fed up with it.

"I also call it 'baboon theory,' which is like, the bluer the bottom, the bigger the person, the better they are to lead. 'Look at my fucking arse, it's so big.' That's all there is to it. Ninjas aren't into that--we just get in there, say our piece and fuck off out of it. We try to avoid being sick on people, which is another tactic that, in particular, record companies use. They try to get you everywhere, even if it's Fishing Monthly or something. You go for a piss in a club now and you've got a talking ad in front of you. It can be fun, but it can be a nightmare too, something to deal with. In a way, Matt and I deal with it with our music, with the Ninja spiel and Ninja attitude. It's a way of navigating a path through the forest of media."

Techno toybox

Rather than relying on mind-numbing media saturation, Ninja Tune have kept their profile low, preferring to bring their customers to them. There's the music, obviously, which goes a long way towards selling itself. There's also the mystique More mentioned--the label is something of a tribe, right down to its own language called Zenspeak. And then there's the fact that Ninja Tune often find themselves on entertainment technology's cutting edge, as with their own VJamm audio-visual mixing software, which they streamlined for public use and presented on the Coldcut multimedia CD Let Us Play.

"That's a particular interest of Matt's and mine, to try and get people involved. It started with us saying, in interviews, 'You can do this--you can make a record.' Then we started developing our software play-tools--we call them that because they're kind of tools and kind of toys as well. They're always works in progress, something that we've used to create a track--for instance, the track on Let Us Play with Jello Biafra was created using the little interactive computer music-making toy that's on the CD-ROM. So it's there, for anyone else to see what they can do with it. I suppose you could say it's vaguely communist--somebody once said something about giving the means of production away. But it's just to get people into it, because I think it's healthy."

And not just for grownups! Given that Ninja Tune started up 10 years ago, many of the early faithful will be into their parenthood years now, opening up a new avenue for Ninja's creative chaos. "Kids' stuff would be wicked--a lot of kids are into VJamm. Once you show them how to work it, they're fascinated. We've got loads of ideas for doing stuff, but we have to careful with our cash, basically, and with our time. But there's various things we've wanted to do--I wanted to have a spoken-word sublabel, which would reissue classic spoken-word material and commission new works, done properly with copious notes and artwork, limited-edition lithographs and all that bollocks. Just make it really nice. But it's not going to happen for the moment."

Media meltdown

More's workload is understandable when you factor in the label, Coldcut, VJamm and other projects, like the long-running underground radio show Solid Steel and recent forays into guerrilla broadcasting via PirateTV. Ninja Tune even reached backward into the archaic medium of print, for Up, Bustle & Out's Rebel Radio Diary, the companion tome to their last album. Hexstatic, meanwhile, have released what is possibly the first CD with digital video clips for every song. Too much information?

"Matt has this theory that in a thousand years, aliens will be listening to the whole works of techno in two minutes' time. It's a similar thing--as things speed up and people are able to deal with more information, you get a taste for it. Then it becomes the norm, then a pain, then the opposite happens. I think there will be a lot more tricks to come, in video, music and film, that synthesis of things moving tighter together. Is it a film, a book, a play, whatever?

"It's that ability to capture a moment in time that's always fascinated humans. From the moment someone drew a mammoth on the wall of a cave and managed to capture their version of reality, through painting and photography to now, with the ability of computers to capture pretty much anything, and gene remixing and splicing. That's all those things are--that moment in time."

Right now is a good moment for Ninja Tune, one that the enlightened will want to capture--with ears and eyes, heart and booty, if nothing else. :

Coldcut play with guests D.K., Wig and Luv at Ex-Centris on Friday, Oct. 13, 9pm, $16