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Coldcut’s recent ‘Sound Mirrors’ album certainly divided longtime fans upon its release earlier this year, as it more or less completely eschewed the turntables and samples dominated production aesthetic of its predecessor ‘Let Us Play’, in many marking a return to the considerably more crossover-oriented outings of their earlier works. While some of the Ninja diehards were left scratching their heads at the more or less complete absence of (ahem) scratches amongst the twelve tracks collected on ‘Sound Mirrors’, a slew of strong accompanying singles as well as an extensive world tour that saw them bringing their lavish A/V performance to Australia just a few months back, certainly went a long way towards winning them a considerably wider fanbase. Given the fact that Coldcut’s Jonothan More and Matt Black have always been renowned for being ahead of the A/V curve, the release of this accompanying video and remix collection certainly comes as no great surprise, but in this case the added twist is Coldcut’s insistence upon giving each respective director complete creative control, rather than the standard industry model of individual directors pitching ideas each other. Add to this the fact that Coldcut issued more or less no brief, except that if possible they were not to appear in the videos, and you certainly have some fertile ground for intriguing ideas indeed.
Clay Lipsky’s previously-commissioned video for single ‘True Skool’ opens the DVD section here, and while it certainly deploys a swathe of spectacular digital effects, alternately switching a prowling Roots Manuva and More and Black huddled behind the decks between photo realism and the intricate artwork style of ‘Sound Mirrors’ sleeve; it’s perhaps most notable for the fact that it adheres so closely to the standard ‘band performance’ template compared to the other non-single videos here. ‘Just For The Kick’s post-consumerist electroclash stomp gets smoothly fused by Smuggling Peanuts to some vaguely nightmarish pencil-hewn sketch animations of a demonically grinning cartoon troll waving a donation can, while an evil-looking moustached guy vaguely reminiscent of the headmaster from Pink Floyd sprouts banks of TV sets from his back and contorted raver outlines twitch in the background. Clay Lipsky’s previously commissioned single video for ‘Walk A Mile In My Shoes’ certainly comes with perhaps the most lavish production budget on show here, but deftly avoids simple predictability, instead opting for ‘Tron’-esque atmospherics and a dizzying rapid-fire visual retrospective of the duo’s career so far, before Andreas Riiser sets the Saul Williams-voiced ‘Mr. Nichols’ (a mini-movie itself in audio form just begging to be rendered in visual form) into a bleak journey through aseptic late-night business man bars and office cubicles. And then there’s the genuinely harrowing ending (which I’m certainly not going to give away here).
Oscar Wright’s previously-commissioned video for first single ‘Everything Is Under Control’ meanwhile revisits the sort of dystopian political territory explored by their election-year ‘Re:evolution’ single, with a pedestrian being menacing by riot armour-clad soldiers and attack helicopters as he walk the streets of inner city London, while Joel Trussel’s retro French animation styled video for ‘This Island Earth’ counterbalances the seriousness whilst injecting more than a few giggles as a Phineas Fogg-style character traverses the globe in a balloon with what looks like Flavor Flav for company. There’s also some visually dazzling undersea pyrokinetics and graceful jellyfish ballet action tucked away right at the very end courtesy of Up The Resolution’s stunning video for title track ‘Sound Mirrors’, which calls to mind Bjork’s similarly mindblowingly aquatic video for ‘Oceania’, off her recent ‘Medulla’ album.
As for the remix disc here, it certainly collects together the lion’s share of the best reworkings on offer across the four previously-released singles, but for this very reason it’s likely to leave a lot of the Coldcut diehards slightly nonplussed, as they’ll pretty much already own most of the tracks here if they’ve been picking up the 12”s. That said, there are certainly plenty of great moments on offer amongst the 14 remixes here, particular personal highlights being DJ Kentaro’s mindblowing rockist dnb retooling of ‘Everything Is Under Control’, Snap Ant’s wiry garage-rock rewrite of the balladic ‘Man In A Garage’ and Switch’s characteristically storming juddery house remix of ‘True Skool.’ There’s also two previously-unreleased tracks here, a rather dated sounding Casuals remix of long-in-the-tooth Coldcut offering ‘People Hold On’ that sounds like it could have come from way back in the day, as well as a more than solid reworking of ‘Sound Mirrors’ album track ‘The State We’re In’, by Coldcut themselves. While I must confess that I was slightly disappointed that Coldcut didn’t decide to pick up on the baton laid down by their previous ‘Let Us Replay’ remix collection, which featured a completely previously unreleased tracklisting, in this case, the remix disc comes across as additional to the main feature here, which is clearly the DVD portion, and one that not only manages to meet the considerably high standards you’d expect of Coldcut, but also comes across as one of the most consistently strong album-length video collections in recent memory.
Check out www.coldcut.tv and www.ninjatune.net
