Review by DjBatman
4 stars out of 4
Coldcut began making music stealing bits from other records in 1987.
Ten years later the duo formed by Matt Black and Jonathon More has explored
all existing music styles and keeps producing and researching. They still
steal and sample (but they often ask permission!), but despite titles
like "Music 4 no musicians", they're some of the most complete
musical minds around. They can come out with anything from breakbeats
to acid jazz to lounge, jungle and ambient and they will still sound fine.
Their experimentation goes further with tracks like "Timber"
(an ecologist anthem with an impressive chainsaw solo, all sampled and
sequenced out of Greenpeace video footage) made out of "video
sampling" i.e. stealing both images and audio and reprocessing
them. "More beats and pieces" is a celebration for Coldcut's tenth
anniversary (and a sequel to their second 1987 single "Beats and
pieces") in the form of musical hijack taken to the limits (and
there's some video sampling here too). Some other memorable bits: the
spacey sampledelia of "Space Journey", Jello Biafra ranting on
"Every home a prison", Salena Saliva's lyrics to "Noah's
toilet", Bernard Purdie on the drums and Omar Khayyam vocoded
("Rubaiyat"), Steinski and Mass Media (master of cutting and
sampling whose "Lessons" inspired Coldcut more than one decade
ago) playing with funny vocal snippets about humanity's favourite obsession
(i.e. sex!) in "I'm wild about that thing", and of course
Hexstatic (Stuart Warren-Hill) contributing to the video sampling madness
of "Timber". One would expect a multimedia track on the
cd, with an AVI movie playable on your PC or something like that...
Coldcut instead dare to deliver an entire cd-rom (practically for free!)
with videos and programs like Playtime and My Little Funkit, that will
transform you in a Coldcut remixer. Black and More have several slogans;
one of them says: "F**k dance, let's art". Here are two guys
that could have a dance hit tomorrow, if only they weren't already having
much more fun as some of the purest post-dance artists of the post-atomic age.
Here's what others reviewers have to say:
"...every great moment of every great partay record that has ever
pulled the rug from under yer cutting size nines...It's the glee, the
incorrect tastelessness, which saves LET US PLAY and makes it more than
the sum of its parts." Melody Maker 9/13/97, p.49
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