Dirty Forums - Coldcut

Coldcut brought their live set to Boston Monday night with amazing results. The past year has seen a resurgence of sorts in long dormant live techno and industrial projects. A new incarnation of the Orb is on the road as I write this. Meat Beat Manifesto toured twice in the space of a year. Prototype 909, Nitzer Ebb, The Final Cut, and Chemlab all have live dates scheduled this month as well. Coldcut has followed suit, with an approach somewhat similar to those of both the Orb and Meat Beat Manifesto. The Orb has switched record labels and released two new albums with Alex Patterson and Thomas Fehlmann as producers. Fehlmann has totally transformed the Orb's sound and may in fact be mostly responsible for their new compositions. Coldcut has also transformed their sound on their new album Sound Mirrors. Although the band's lineup remains the same, Sound Mirrors has less breakbeat and more four-on-the-floor rhythms. The kitsch and goofy spirit of previous releases have been replaced by more in-your-face politics. Listening to "Everything Is Under Control" leaves a similar impression to Saul Williams' explicitly anti-war "The Pledge to Resist": out of character, because it's plain that everyone is missing the point nowadays.

On stage, Coldcut grows from a duo to five persons. A makeshift table is covered with an entire studio: five laptops, a Pioneer DVJ, two turntables, video cameras, assorted mixers and other gadgets. These are operated by Jonathan More and Matt Black, the core duo of Coldcut, with one assistant, one combination videographer/VJ/DJ scratching and mixing video and audio. A heretofore unknown MC spits rhymes in the mic while sharing his vodka bottle with the crowd, spiking guys' drinks but feeding the girls directly from the mouth (the bottle's, that is, not his own).

Wasn't I talking about Meat Beat Manifesto earlier? Their tour had an unprecedented amount of gear for a laptop era, and an uncommmon emphasis on live and synchronous audiovisual media manipulation. Coldcut would be biting their style, except for the fact that both Coldcut and MBM were doing this ten years ago, before you could buy an expensive bit of kit to do most of work for you. Coldcut even sells their own software for this task. They were in top form in Boston, scratching video clips of Tony Blair and George Bush with their own computer animations mixed in, along with live video of the venue and videos of their guest vocalists who didn't make the trip across the Atlantic (or into the future, in some cases). Fortunately, they didn't stick to political wisecracks for entire night. Bush is too easy a target.

I can't remember the tracklist, but every song they played was its own little party. The band dance around quite a lot (well, for a laptop band anyway) and the MC hyping up the crowd beforehand didn't hurt. He asked to hear us say "wanker" in an American accent, but I doubt it sounds all that different in Massachusetts. We always say it in a fake British accent anyway. They were nice enough to play "Timber", an extraordinary rendition of "Atomic Moog 2000", and even a little bit of "Music 4 No Musicians" alongside the newer tracks "True Skool", "Just For The Kick", and "Walk A Mile". For an encore (obviously preplanned) they played "Everything Is Under Control", which really comes alive in person. Freestyle rhymes beat cliché telephone-filtered ones anytime.

Afterwards, Jon More and Matt Black were kind enough to meet everyone in the crowd at the merchandise booth.