Greg Bowes CD of the week
The titles of the three Ninja Cuts compilations from Britain’s inspired weird-beat label Ninja Tune, are always extraordinarily tongue-twisting. Funkjazztical Tricknology, Flexistentialism,
and now Ninja Cuts III: Funkungfusion (Ninja Cuts), the latest round-up of revolutionary
sounds from their roster.
Headed up by sonic sorcerers Coldcut, who were once responsible for side-saddling both Yazz and Lisa Stansfield into the upper echelons of the charts and whose More
Beats’n’Pieces is one of the highlights of this collection, the crew includes dangerous beat deployers like Luke Vibert, Funki Porcini and Amon Tobin.
What the twenty-five or so artists on these two discs share is an irreverence for convention. It’s evident in the track titles – so telling for these mostly instrumental tunes: Conquest of the Irrational, Humerous Counterpoint, Soluble Ducks. The common attitude – inherited from musique concrte and the cut’n’paste methods of William Burroughs and hip-hop – is one of “nothing is good unless you play with it”.
Turntablist Kid Koala and keyboard fetishist Money Mark use the sounds of typewriter
keys to tap out a rhythm, while their virtual guitarist strums one perfectly-pitched note. The Herbaliser fuse this same restrained minimalism with some B-boy boot for the
dancefloor shuffle; most surprising is Talvin Singh’s recast of Ryuichi Sakamoto as some breakneck big-beat Godzilla.
While the Funkungfusionists can create mayhem with the big-barrel basslines and
beatbox thuds, they can also saturate the listener in ceaseless collage. Disc two is an after-hours trawl through languid jazz, caressing breakbeats and milder moods.
Trying to pigeonhole the music here is pointless; the press release comes closest with “the bombastic wonder of jazz at the edge of hip-hop, techno and outrock”. Ninja Cuts III: Funkungfusion is a sometimes exasperating melange of mixed-up messages, sequenced as superbly as one of Coldcut’s notorious scratch’n’patch DJ sets – which is recommendation
enough.