Coldcut: Let Us Play!

I bought this when it came out (1997) because I was interested in the multimedia element and Coldcut were supposed to be switched on to this, as well as the whole William Burroughs sampling and cut-up technique. Instead of just a data partition on an audio CD, the multimedia here gets it's own dedicated CD-ROM (my 1997 copy required a pre-2004 computer to play it on, but I see they're still offering the CD-ROM version for sale, so presumably they've updated the code).

Comparison with the multimedia element of Erewhon makes Coldcut's effort seem pretty feeble. Mostly it's just an 'asset dump' of photos and videos. There's a couple of little 'playgrounds' for creating your own mixes from their tracks, which everyone was doing in the mid-90s (and abandoned soon after as a dead end). And there's a very so-what interactive pub quiz to test your knowledge of radical geek culture. Whereas Erewhon's material seems to have been conceived and implemented from the ground up by David Thomas himself, Coldcut have outsourced it to radical-geek-agency-of-choice kleber — which makes it slicker in some ways (though the navigation defeated me several times), but also less personal. And where David Thomas used the medium to re-imagine his 'stuff' at a molecular level, Coldcut stick mostly to conventional formats. A disappointment.

As is the music, coming as it does with a whole load of cultural 'theory' that seems to weigh it down like baggage rather than creating anything exciting or challenging. I picture Coldcut being hired to do DJ sets at ICA digital media openings, where people with rimless glasses like mine congratulate each other on how subversive they are while drinking expensively dressed foreign lager and trotting out the same old Ballard-Baudrillard-Burroughs cocktail chit-chat that the ICA has been bogged down in for a generation. And I speak as someone who once organised a symposium on digital music at the ICA (yes, there was 'cyber' in the title — for shame — not my choice, nor was the music, which included Fennesz and Kid606 rather than Coldcut).

The album is it its best when borrowing overtly from real talents like Steve Reich, on Music for No Musicians, and Steinski, on I'm Wild About That Thing.

MusicBrainz entry for disc 1, disc 2 Wikipedia entry for this album Rate Your Music entry for this album Listen to this album in full at Last.fm