Coldcut are dance music royalty, their long fingers tracing distinctively psychedelic patterns across the history of UK culture.

Their first single, 1987’s Say Kids What Time Is It? was one of the first songs to be built entirely out of samples, pioneering the hip hop cut-and-paste style. Later that year their remix of Eric B and Rakim’s Paid In Full became a club classic that scraped the British top 20 and influenced breakbeat.

In 1988, Doctorin’ the House, with Yazz, became one of the first British house hits; another collaboration with the singer, The Only Way Is Up, hit number one for five weeks the same year. Topping off the decade, Coldcut’s debut album 1989’s What’s That Noise was one of the first albums - at least in the UK - to show that dance music had a life beyond one-off tracks. 

And that’s just the 80s.

In 1990 they launched their Ninja Tune label, which has become one of the biggest, most influential independent labels worldwide, home to everyone from Black Country, New Road to Flying Lotus. In 1995 Coldcut released 70 Minutes of Madness, acclaimed as one of the greatest mix albums of all time; and in 1997, the duo’s third album, Let Us Play included a multimedia CD Rom that showed how far Coldcut had gone into the world of mixing music and visual art, a path they continue to walk today.

Coldcut were the brains behind Nina Jamm, an early music making and remix app, and Zen Delay, a custom hardware effects unit; they’ve toured the world, worked with everyone from Jello Biafra to Lisa Stansfield. And they are still at it today, most recently releasing Keleketla!, a collaborative album with African musicians including the legendary Tony Allen. Really, Coldcut have done it all.

So I jumped at the opportunity to talk to Matt Black, one half of the duo alongside Jonathan More, ostensibly around the re-release of their fifth album Sound Mirrors for its 20th anniversary. But as you will see, we got diverted.

The interview was released as a Line Noise podcast recently. But here, in slightly edited form, you have the text. Enjoy.

Ben Cardew: Sound Mirrors celebrates its birthday this year. How does it make you feel that your fifth album has hit 20 years old?

Matt Black: I think we can all look at the passage of time and go, “F*ck me, that's going fast, isn't it?" And how did it happen? It’s 40 years next year that Jon and I have been working together. Actually, that's a career - that’s a lifetime, really, of an adult working path. But you know what? Time is a weird thing. It seems like a couple of weeks ago, 2006, but it also seems like an eternity ago as well. I'm still quite happy with that work, the Sound Mirrors work; I think it's held up well.

Ben Cardew: How do you think it fits into the Coldcut catalogue?

Matt Black: I think we've always been quite easily distracted and always casting around for something new. It's a kind of musical ADHD, I suppose - an overused term, perhaps. But that album was the album where I would say Jonathan took more of a leading role than some of the stuff in the past. I was the one initially that knew how to operate a computer and I was really happy with tech and Jon was more on the selector DJing side. He did get stuck in - in fact, he largely composed the first ever Ninja Tune release, Bogus Order - Zen Breaks. That was his first attempt at using a sampler and sequencer and just getting into it himself.

Then for Sound Mirrors, I was really involved in a bunch of other projects, and Jon took a leading role on that. I remember going down to The Dairy studio in Brixton where he was working with an engineer, and they played me A Whistle and a Prayer and I just said, "Wow, that's excellent. I can't fault that." It sounded just perfect and really ticked all the boxes of goodness. I thought, "Wow, Jon’s surpassing me now, actually." But it's a kind of good, friendly competition to have. I did then steam in later with some quite good tracks which I mainly put together, like Everything Is Under Control and True Skool. So I kind of retrieved a decent contribution to it at the last moment.

Ben Cardew: How did you and Jonathan work in the studio back then? Or how do you still work now? Is it one of you goes in and does something and the other adds touches, or are you actually side-by-side on the computer stool?

Matt Black: It's always changing. But looking back over that 40-year period, a lot of the time we've let each other do our own thing. We've talked about stuff and made suggestions, but we've been happy to let each of us take a creative lead sometimes. Then sometimes we'll look at it and we'll say, "Okay, well actually that's not suitable as a Coldcut tune; this can be a Matt Black release." Jon, not so much but I'd be more like doing odd little projects and so on. But generally, it's good when we both agree, like, "Yeah, this is Coldcut. This can go out with the Coldcut name." And it takes many forms.

Ben Cardew: I'm interested that you said something might not be suitable for Coldcut. What would make it not suitable? Because the Coldcut catalogue is very varied; I can imagine a lot of things fitting under that umbrella.

Matt Black: Yes, but I mean, to be frank, Jon might feel actually it's just not to his taste. And I respect that. I know there have been occasions when Jon’s done something or been working on something and I've said, "No, I don't actually like that, I'm not happy with it," and he's accepted that with good grace. So we have quite a good, flexible working accord with each other.

Ben Cardew: How did you get to that point? That seems very healthy.

Matt Black: When we started off, I was basically making the first few tracks. Like I say, I was the one that could operate the decks and the four-track and the sequencer. Jon was known as a key DJ around town; he was on Kiss FM and he'd been doing these brilliant parties called Meltdown and Flim Flam. Those were two series of warehouse parties that were much loved. So he was better known than me but I was actually more technically savvy as a DJ.

Then we put these first records out and we started having some arguments about who should be credited and how we should split the money. So we came up with a solution, which was just to say, "Let's just split everything 50/50." Right? Not worry about who found what sample or who sequenced this bit. Let's call it Coldcut. Anything Coldcut will split 50/50, be credited to Coldcut and any returns from it will be divided equally.

That's worked really amazingly well as a sort of game theory. It’s all about whether you cooperate or you defect with your partner. We decided it was better to cooperate and be partners. That understanding has kept us in a good relationship with each other over 40 years. Sometimes there have been problems about "Does this fall into Coldcut or doesn't it?" but we've negotiated those successfully. A lot of other partnerships that started around when we did have not stood the test of time; often things split up over arguments about credit and money. This solution enabled us to avoid that.

Coming off that, it’s like: "Okay mate, well you can go on and make a track, just do your thing, and assuming I'm cool with it, that can be Coldcut." And I can do the same thing, or I can go off and work on some interactive software and that can be a Coldcut release as well. It provides a creative space for each of us to do our own thing within the partnership.

Ben Cardew: Going back to Sound Mirrors, it strikes me as an album that doesn't have a particular genre. There’s house, hip hop and all kinds of different things. When you're making music, how do you decide where to go? At some point, you've got to be like, "Well, this is the BPM, and this is where the beat's going to be," and that defines the genre. I know people don't like talking about genres, but when is the moment when you come in and you're like, "Right, 125 BPM, four-to-the-floor kick drum," or something?

Matt Black: That's a really good question. I'm happy with genres as long as you can have more than one at the same time. The idea that your record's got to be in this box or this one is old-fashioned and applies to old-school record shops with vinyl - which have their charm - but we've always liked to be in as many different boxes as possible. It's more about keywords nowadays; it's more about a search for stuff.

I think to Jon and me, the great John Peel had a lot of influence on making it cool to be into a lot of different sorts of music. Then hip hop provided the blending machine to be able to literally mix influences and genres and records together. We took that and ran with it and that cut-and-paste excitement and freedom is what we've worked out of. Like you say, BPM - if you take a hip hop track and speed it up, it sounds like jungle, right? We bust out of that as well. But it's not like we go into the studio with a plan; it generally emerges from the material. Montage emerges from the material that you've got to sample. Connections just automatically emerge and then that leads to a shape. If you're lucky, the BPM will be answered automatically out of that shape.

But I do like the fluidity of electronic sound. I'm actually as proud of our app, Jamm, as I am with many of our recorded works because, to me, that's our statement on montage, electronic music and the plasticity of sound - that you can go anywhere with it. With Jamm, you can take a track and just speed it up. If I'm playing a live set and I feel it needs to be a bit more lively, I'll play a track at 125 rather than 105.

For example, you can take Bonobo's Eyesdown, which is a beautiful track. He gave us the stems and we made a set out of it in Jamm. But as well as having the original elements in it, we've also shoehorned in a bunch of other what we call "remix clips." There's a half-speed reggae swing dub drum track at 65 BPM. So you can take it and turn it into a dub track just by introducing a different sample. I just enjoy the freedom of being able to take things instantly in any direction using a piece of interactive software.

Ben Cardew: Thinking of something like Jamm, it strikes me that you must like the idea that everyone can make music. So do I. But at the same time, I do slightly worry about the amount of music being released. I don't quite know where to stand because I'd like everyone to make music but 80,000 tracks a day to Spotify seems a bit too much. Where do you stand?

Matt Black: Well, it's good to be asking yourself these questions because they're not questions that have a direct answer. We've got to get away from binary thinking. "Non-binary" is a word which can be applied to anything, like a 360-degree view. Totally, there's too much new music out there and it's killing everything - and then we’re hit with AI.

But actually, I've played around with the AI things; they're terrific fun. It may be that people that wouldn't otherwise be able to make a track have got some really good ideas - perhaps vocals or a theme for a song - which they can now realise. However, on the oversupply of music... I think I'm out of my NDA with Google now. They showed me their system at Ibiza IMS a couple of years ago. I said, "Yes, blows my mind," but my mind had been blown already because my mates had showed me some stuff like that a couple of years before. I told them, "It solves a problem that doesn't exist: a shortage of music."

He didn't know quite how to take that. But backtracking: who am I to say you shouldn't make music or there's not enough room for you to express yourself? If you think, "Okay, well, I want to be a techno DJ and that's going to be my career," terrific, go for it. But is that really going to be a career now or in a few years' time? So it might be better not to give up the day job and just stick with it as your hobby.

Like a worried parent, I might say maybe it's better to keep music as your passion. But then again, the world's so f*cking crazy at the moment. The pace of change is so insane and AI is just one of the tipping points. All the old ways of "I’ll study and become a doctor or be a lawyer and never be out of a job” - those certainties are gone now. Actually, nowadays I'm saying just go for it. Just do whatever you want because the old "sure things" don't work anymore. The levers don't work.

Ben Cardew: When you experimented with AI, did you at any point ask it to make a Coldcut song?

Matt Black: Well, I've been messing around with this stuff for 50 years. Before the current LLM craze, I was already playing with stuff. A few years ago, I did get an earlier system to do a Coldcut track and it came up with something that I thought was pretty cool. I think I got it to remix "Beats + Pieces," and it sped it up and put all this dubstep stuff in. It’s like, "Actually, yeah, that's cool."

But I'm totally on the horns of the same dilemma myself. We created our own monster. "Come on in everyone, let's just make music, it's really easy." And we make it even easier by making Jamm. It's like Legos - it’s great, isn't it? And it is. But do I actually want to listen to a lot of music that's made like that? In fact, I want to hear something that's more like "real" music - acoustic. I went to see Thundercat last night. I found it a bit too jazzy but the guy can seriously play his instrument and loves doing it. It’s the joy of that theatre, isn't it?

Ben Cardew: Well, also, I think that kind of personality will really be important in the AI age, because you couldn't "invent" Thundercat. I don't even know what kind of prompts you'd put in to come up with Thundercat.

Matt Black: He's just brilliant but incredibly different. Hopefully, humanity will manage to hang on to that - the human will still be respected, loved, and emulated. Who wants to emulate an AI?

Ben Cardew: Back to Sound Mirrors. How did you work out what guests to get in? How did you get Roots Manuva on True Skool, for example?

Matt Black: For that track, I went to India for my first visit on a British Council thing. I went with Aki Nawaz from Fun-Da-Mental and Nation Records - really interesting musician. I said, "I need some Bollywood records. Do you know anything about it?" He said, "Well, this looks pretty good: a five-CD set of Bollywood hits from the last 50 years." So I bought it, and then I didn't listen to it for several years. One day I put it on and on one track it was like: "There's my sounds!"

So then I put the track together and that sat around for a while. Like I say, Jon was leading on that record and I was like, “F*ck, I need to do something here." This track was sounding good, so let me put it out there. Then I think it was Peter Quicke’s suggestion to see if Rodney [Roots Manuva] could jump on the track. I was away for a bit, I came back and Pete said, "Rodney's done a vocal to the track." I said, "Is it good?" He says, "Yeah, it's great.” “Are we in single territory?" "Yes, I think we are." So then I listened to it, and it was like: "Rodney’s come through with a blinder."

Ben Cardew: There is a song with Robert Owens, Walk a Mile in My Shoes, on Sound Mirrors. Would it be fair to say that people weren't expecting a house tune from you in 2006 or had it got to the stage where people knew Coldcut could be anything?

Matt Black: I think we carved out that space where we could be anything. Like I say, Journeys by DJ did that. If you look back, Doctorin' the House is house speed with an acid house bass line but it's full of hip hop samples and breaks. Then we came out with Stop This Crazy Thing, which was a Go-Go track - a Washington DC sort of funk track, really - but nodding towards hip hop. There's a Kurtis Blow intersection point there. I don't think people were surprised, because it's all a matter of BPM, really.

Ben Cardew: Are you the kind of person that goes into the studio every day - an Aphex Twin type who can't be kept out - or are you more "as and when the idea strikes you"?

Matt Black: No, I'm ashamed to say I spend far too much time doing email, glued to my screen and trying to do other projects. I'd love to just do music all the time, but I haven't been because I've been busy with other stuff.

If you look back at what we've been doing over the last 40 years in terms of R&D, inventions, audio-visualism, and other forms of experimentation - that’s where my energy's gone. I'm broadly happy with the results. Not everything's been a smashing success but R&D is difficult, expensive and time-consuming. There's been sufficient killer output to justify that direction. I think Zen Delay was a good one. I'd rather have made the Zen Delay than another album, to be honest. It earned us a f*ck-load more money as well.

Ben Cardew: Do you have one person you would still love to work with?

Matt Black: Well, an obvious answer is George Clinton. Oh, I must say, the Sly Stone documentary, Sly Lives - that blew my mind. That went straight in at number one in my all-time Black Heroes Pantheon, possibly knocking George and James Brown off. But those guys are my heroes. George is still going, bless him.

Rakim, actually - he’s been on our hit list for a while. We have reached out a few times but we haven't heard back. He must be chilling in his mansion, but his supernatural take on rap was really unique and influential. That would be a good name.

Björk! I really respect someone who's done their own thing and still managed to be commercially successful but totally seems to have done it on their terms. It’s a bit of a disappointment, actually; I think Björk and Coldcut could have been a really great mix. Maybe that could still happen.

Ben Cardew: I'm sort of surprised it hasn't happened.

Matt Black: It's just laziness on our part, I think. But you can't do everything. But yeah, she would be great. 

Ben Cardew: You were on Top of the Pops, right, back in the 80s? Did you feel like a pop star?

Matt Black: Well, it was a lifetime ambition thing. It was great. But things are seldom what they seem. Do you remember the lovely big Top of the Pops sign? When you get there and you see that, you find it's just made of expanded polystyrene. It's all quite chipped and f*cked up. They just light it and it looks great but the reality didn't quite measure up. Sometimes it can be a bit like that.

Ben Cardew: Did you ever think that you were bringing house music to eight-year-olds at the time?

Matt Black: No, I think our audience was basically broadly people like us. Jon and I always liked kids' records; we used to mix in kids' stories and phrases as spoken word. Gregory Isaacs' version of Puff the Magic Dragon is a killer tune. I think Jon and I might not have thought about "house music for eight-year-olds," but we had, and still have, a playful attitude. That's kept us interested and still with some juice.

Some listening

Declan McDermott - Why Don’t Your Believe Me (I:Cube ‘pourqoir’ remix)

One of the reasons we fell in love with French house in the 90s was how ineffably chic and sophisticated it felt, like cruising down the Champs-Élysées in a vintage sports car while well-attired paparazzi took pictures of your squeeze. I:Cube’s remix of Declan McDermott’s Who Don’t You Believe In Me is - like a lot of I:Cube’s work - the embodiment of this, its grooves both well tended and incredibly funky, with shades of conga, touches of clavinet and scratch guitar, an exquisite chord shift and a French voice asking “pourquoi?”, like Moodymann on Montmartre.

Hercules & Love Affair - Crossed Lines (Mr. Fingers Acid Mix)

For anyone who finds Mr. Fingers’ recent output to be just a little bit too smooth, his recent mix for Hercules & Love Affair’s Crossed Lines could be the pea under the mattress. Fingers takes the song’s delicate and ever so slightly desperate vocal and puts a scratchy 303 line underneath it, roughing it all up in a vaguely cosmic fashion, like the last rusty spaceship sweeping the universe in search of salvation.

Tricky and Marta - Out of Place

It seems slightly unfair to say that Out of Place is Tricky in Mezzanine mode but… well how else can you describe a dark-as-thunder mixture of post punk, hip hop and looming strings? Clearly, this is no bad thing and Out of Place, with Tricky’s faithful counterpart Marta, is a fabulous reminder that the flame still burns in the Tricky chest. (See also Hate This Pain, from 2020’s Fall To Pieces, a chilling howl of distress.)

Special Request - Uncanny Valley

As a child, I used to bash out the riffs from the rave tunes I heard on Top of the Pops on the family piano and marvel at how deceptively simple they were. I am pretty confident that Paul Woolford - AKA Special Request - used to do the same thing and now, with Uncanny Valley, he has one of his own, a magnificently catchy tune based around an infuriatingly simple-sounding riff that, of course, actually turns out to be nothing of the sort, surrounded by all kinds of head-turning production weirdness and towering breaks.

Sonic Youth - Diamond Seas 1995

AKA how to take 30 live versions of a classic Sonic Youth song, pile them on top of each other and not end up with an utter car crash. For this special Record Store Day release, Sonic Youth recruited John Oswald, who coined the term “plunderphonic” in the 1980s, to perform his special magic on the band’s 1995 song Diamond Seas, resulting in two tracks, one made up of 1995 live recordings, one of those from 1996, that I absolutely had to listen to and which didn’t disappoint when I did, a fascinating experiment in sound that is surprisingly listenable.

Jura, ML Buch, Clarissa Connelly & Ydegirl - You Make a Fire, You Make a Camp

Sometimes ambition is all. You Make a Fire, You Make a Camp is “five chapters, five strangers stuck together for five years, performed by five lead singers” - difficult enough in itself - but Jura (who, I must confess, is new to me) has added to this a production that is sneakily experimental, courtesy of a rhythm that creeps around the house like a nervous kitten and interwoven instrumental slivers that combine in a snugly deceiving cats cradle of a song.

Things I’ve done

IZCO - Powerscroft

I’ve been going on about IZCO’s debut album for a while now - and I finally got the chance to review it, for DJ Mag. “…dance music with fire in its heart and the wind at its heel, to be enjoyed rather than understood.”

RPS Presents - Buzzcocks

The Line Noise podcast is, basically, about electronic music. I sometimes wonder, though, if I should introduce a Line Noise Rock spin off, as I get to interview some wonderful people whose work stands far away from the world of electronic music. Does that sound like a good idea? Would you listen? 

This week I was thinking about this because I interviewed the punk legend that is Steve Diggle of Buzzcocks ahead of the band's recent gig in Hospitalet. We talked about 50th anniversaries, being honest, Motown vibes, the changing face of Manchester, Pete Shelley and much more, including a couple of excellent Kurt Cobain stories towards the end. 

Electronic music? Not touched on. And you can listen to the interview as things stand, obviously, using the links above. But should I make it Line Noise? What do you think? Or would it just muddy the waters?

Line Noise podcast - Myd returns 

Myd returned to Line Noise ahead of his recent Barcelona gig to talk the joys of playing live, tour bus life, his recent album Mydnight and the pain of losing a hard drive. Plus, prepare yourselves for some severe Todd Edwards-spotting.

The playlists

Apple Music: The newest and bestest 2026.

Spotify: the newest and bestest 2026.

Apple Music: The newest and the bestest

Spotify: The newest and the bestest.