Coldcut cooks with audio-visuals

By Brian O’Camb
Daily Bruin Senior Staff

Zen masters have seen the future of music, and thankfully they
are willing to share their secrets with the rest of us.

Celebrating a decade of fresh music with the release of
“Xen Cuts,” the British record label, Ninja Tunes, held
a 10-year anniversary party featuring founders Coldcut, DJ DK with
Solid Steel and the Hombre All Stars at the El Rey Theatre Monday
night.

While the doors opened an hour late, the venue’s choice
lighting, twin visual screens and sound system made the event worth
the wait.

Starting off the evening were the Hombre All Stars. Dropping
tunes for the incoming crowd, the DJ offered a taste of everything
fresh, from hip hop featuring Steve Miller and Eric Clapton
samples, to funky beats overlayed with bright horns.

Declaring it a British night, the MC promised a good time as the
DJ continued his straight mixes. While the tracks were heavy and
fun, the only scratching came recorded in the tracks, and not from
the DJ. Still, the Hombre All Stars got the crowd moving and set
the scene for MVP.

The show took shape as MVP brought their kitschy audio-visual
mixing to the stage, slicing and dicing commercial images for their
own twisted uses.

Using the twin video screens which acted as facing mirrors, MVP
added punchy techno to a feature titled “Horned
Gramma,” which showcased an elderly woman with a gnarled horn
growing from her forehead. As the track progressed, she moved from
lovably weird to downright freaky, begging for kisses while
promising not to frighten as her eyes morphed and stretched,
revealing blackness within.

On other features, such as “The Price is Wrong” and
“Kung Fu,” MVP’s visual artists used a hand-held
controller to manipulate second-long video clips, transforming Bob
Barker, Bruce Lee and Sammy Davis Jr. into automatons. In the
background, electro tracks accentuated their jerky movements.

Shifting gears, the DJ threw down hard step jungle beat which
got people on the floor as images of headbangers, convulsing and
shaking their fists, added to the furious sounds ripping through
the speakers.

Up next was Solid Steel featuring DJ DK. Redirecting the
ambiance of the scene, DK spliced samples of the Orb’s
“Little Fluffy Clouds” into heavy break-beat bass,
while Solid Steel offered serene scenes of cloudy skies and ocean
wharves that flowed steadily in contrast to MVP’s jumpy
commercial gunfire.

The set quickly moved into black-and-white film clips scored
with bland breaks, but DK shifted flavors with a funky reggae vibe
as Solid Steel’s montage turned into an abstract, up-close
video of graffiti-covered walls.

While the early part of DK’s set was flawed by excessive
bass and boring visuals, he was able to work out the sound problems
and ignite the dance floor with a touch of house, techno, breaks,
electro and everything in between.

Showing no respect for anyone, Solid Steel offered an array of
visuals ranging from a grimacing Boris Yeltsin who twisted and
danced to a track sampling Aretha Franklin, to tableau arms out of
which spun black and white faces which exponentially morphed out of
devouring mouths, a feat only possible via the wonders of computer
technology.

Eventually, Coldcut took over the stage, revealing their
experience in AV mixing. With a simple shot of the Los Angeles
skyline, “Wassup L.A.!” flashed across the screen
before the trio launched into an innovative exercise of
“audio-visual tricknology” with live scratching
provided by Matt Black.

With live video feeds from a headcam, Coldcut offered a view of
the turntables and laptops at the heart of their madness. This
footage was inset next to the original animation and stock movie
clips dominated

the screens.

At this point, the crowd slowed down, but whether this was due
to the superb visual feast or the change in music was unclear. The
group continued to synch experimental synth beats and buzzes with
the images, but on the whole, the music was undanceable for lack of
a steady beat.

But the group captured the crowd’s attention with one of
the most somber numbers of the evening. Combining weighty bass,
brooding drums and a harsh mechanistic voice with images from
nature, Coldcut offered commentary on environmental issues.

Footage of police officers wrestling environmentalists and
Balkan refugees in Yugoslavia served to underscore rings of dancers
and street jugglers.

In a brilliant twist, Coldcut moved from the human impact on the
environment to nature by speeding up time-lapsed images of blooming
blossoms which erupted violently on screen.

Eventually, the layered images became so blurred that only the
music remained as an anchor for the crowd, combining South American
flute with hard drill ‘n’ bass, only to wind down to
the more nuanced brooding heard at the start of the piece.

As founders of the Ninja Tunes label, it was obvious why Coldcut
proclaims itself masters of audio-visual tricknology. Armed with
laptops and turntables, all of the artists of the night brought a
new face to electronic music, proving that images do speak louder
than words.

Just don’t forget the music.