Coldcut/Hexstatic
Timber
Ninja Tune
If the name Coldcut brings forth sniggers and images of the deli counter at the supermarket, consider your knuckles soundly rapped for your insolence. Pioneering the extreme levels of remixing we enjoy today, Coldcut has four times the career most of today’s “veteran” electronic music acts possess. Look it up, and be prepared.
The title track, an environmental treatise, is composed mostly of organic and found sounds. This is not really audible, but becomes obvious once you explore the videos included on the disc. Consisting of the original Hexstatic video and four “video remixes” (one by famed vid samplers EBN), the cuts have specific visuals – chainsaws, axes, the haunting synthetically ululating vocalist – fading in and out, jumping and jittering with their corresponding audio samples. Maybe live video mixing technology is still in its infant stages, but it seems to have come a long way in the last few years, and these videos stand as more than technical demonstrations, showing true artistry and injecting meaning into something which could probably have passed on its geekworthiness alone.
Before I get too carried away with the multimedia component, I should say that the music on here is also top notch; I listened to this for a week solid before even plopping it in my CD-ROM tray. A winning purchase all around. Ninja Tune, 1751 Richardson, Suite 6109, Montreal, Quebec H3K 1G6; http://www.obsolete.com/pipe/ninja/
