It seemed that there’s something quite archaic now about the idea of a DJ/Producer collective, given that most artists tend to use multiple co-creators for fear of their audience getting bored easily. Maybe the reason is that everyone’s been stuck in their bedrooms for the last 18 months, but you did get to wandering whether or not an endangered species order was needed.
Coldcut, a loose affiliation of eccentrics who shared a mutual love of beats, breaks and obscure spoken word cut ups long before they were introduced into hip-hop – had considerable chart success in the pop world, after starting out on the then still-pirate KISS. For purists however there was the Jazz Brakes series which swung both in an old fashioned sense and also towards ambient electronica; it was succeeded in 2000 with the Kaleidoscope album, on which ‘cuttters Kevin Foakes, aka Strictly Kev, and Patrick Carpenter, aka PC, dialed up the esoteric alchemy on a trip to all four sonic corners of their universe.
Whilst shuffling through lots of unreleased material in preparation for a 20th anniversary edition, the pair decided that they had way to much good stuff to hold on to. The result is this, a sort of remix, sort of reimagining project that via the thirteen minute Quadraplex (A Trip To The Galactic Centre) and Hip Operation’s oddly compelling sampleadelics showcases the chops which insiders have known about all along. Turns out with a bit of googling that the DJ collective idea is still very much a thing; the new generations’s elders might not be betters, but they’re still cool enough to come to your party.
You can read a full review here.
The Voice Of Unreason 