Words by Ben Lowe

You’re pulled away from your current state of mind to one of contemplation and contentment by the opening chords of a solitary piano and the delicate hiss of audio hardware. More than 20 tracks later your consciousness are gently reintroduced into the real world by the closing bars of “Autumn Leaves Return”. Rejuvenated, and immensely relieved you hit the play button all those tracks ago.

Coldcut, which is made up of two members, Matt Black, and Jon More, have influenced the UK electronic scene since the 1980s and have just released a 30 track ambient compilation album which is also mixed by Mixmaster Morris. The record features an eclectic roster of composers and producers such as Ryuichi Sakamoto, Sigur Rós, Imogen Heap, and Specimens, to name only a few. It’s a collage of organic and synthetic soundscapes that invite you to stay still for a while.

Historically, through the decades, Coldcut’s music had been sample-heavy, uptempo mashups, but after observing the anxious world around them and candid conversations with friends, new threads of inspiration began to unravel, coaxing them to create something that would allow people to slow down. “The pressures that have been building in society since the millennium...things and even the world have gotten significantly weirder since then," Jon shares.

“Before the pandemic really got rolling, I met this young guy, he became a friend of mine and he told me that he suffers from panic attacks and that he’d found that ambient music really helps him with those, so I thought wow there’s a really good example, a case study if you like, of how ambient music can be directly, psychologically helpful” (Matt).

Matt and Jon created the compilation in response to the world’s anxieties and the people they encountered struggling with their own mental health. The album title “@0” Matt explains, refers to a state of mental clarity where your emotions are balanced but could tip one way or the other. @0 is a record for healing. “To make music that would be relaxing and healing in a time of major psychological pressure for most of humanity,” says Matt. A portion of the profit’s from the album will be donated to CALM, Black Minds Matter, and Mind.

When the artists were approached by Coldcut and their label, Ninja Tune (founded by Matt and Jon) they asked for them to contribute to the mental health compilation, the artists weren’t given a brief of what the music should be, or how it should sound. All that was asked for was music that was “lush” and “beautiful”. Jon remembers being pleasantly surprised as the tracks started coming in from the artists - how they all seemed to fit sonically. “When I put the tracks through a little plug-in that tunes everything and tells you what key it’s in, they all interact with each other. Which is crazy because there was no brief."

Matt and Jon worked in Ableton to curate and sequence the tracks using their own delay hardware unit, the Zen Delay on certain sections, and one of their own plugins called Midi Volve, which is an AI arpeggiator. Jon also had a go-to reverb plug-in called ‘Drip’ which he used frequently. “I splurged it across quite a lot of it (laughs)”. Matt mentioned how when working with ambient music, a creative challenge that needs to be solved is deciding how much “colour” you want to add to any particular track (using effects like delays and reverbs). It’s a creative problem that needs a tasteful solution.

As creative challenges in music production go, Matt and Jon say technology creates as many problems as it solves. “In 1988 you were incredibly limited in what you could do and it was quite clunky, you stitched it together and everything took a long time. Now, you’ve got a million choices and you can make everything sound like anything”, says Jon. “It’s paralyzing, you’ve got too much freedom”, echoes Matt. Modern DAW’s allow music creators the freedom to do so much that it’s difficult to know where to start. Matt says the simple trick to break out of the paralysis is to stay focused on your initial ideas and manage your distractions. 

Jon echoes a similar opinion and explains that when it comes to creativity, there “are a combination of two things”. The first is “pushing yourself to do it on a daily basis,” staying disciplined and practicing every day, whether it’s running up and down scales or working on your sound design theory. The other aspect is focusing on how you feel in the moment of creative inspiration and following your intuition. “Finding that mood where you’re feeling creative and 4 hours just disappear in an instant because you’re so focused.”

Matt stresses that in order to stay creative, it’s important to find a balance between your work as an artist and everyday life. “A certain amount of focus and drive is necessary for you to get something special but there has to be some balance with your life otherwise you become a sad obsessive (laughs)”. What’s kept me going is the love of creativity, the joy of the creative process, of making something.” Matt explains that being creative in itself, working on your craft, solving problems, and being in the moment is what perpetuate an artist’s creative cycle.

As for finding your “style” or “sound” as an artist, Jon says this comes from being inspired by other artists. You might want to recreate certain synth sounds or use similar chord progressions to those artists that you love. What happens over time is you begin to internalise the rules and techniques used by those influences. As a result, they become a part of your palette when creating. “It’s not copying the songs, but learning the technique in a way, it’s not so easy to put into words but it’s sort of getting to understand how the artists you might be influenced by and love have made that music,” says Jon.

Aside from creating music, Matt and Jon work with moving images but not in the same way that composers or sound designers might. They’ll use visuals as an extension of the musical universe that they create. Matt shares that artists over the past 100 years have often talked about the relationship between the senses and various artistic mediums. “Baudelaire's poem is about the idea that in the perception of harmony, beauty, tone, dissonance, pattern, rhythm, there might be correspondences between the sentences..so if you like AV is a research project into that. We’ve been pursuing that for the last 30 years now and it’s been a very fruitful area."

It’s evident from their 30-year career as pioneers in electronic music, the apps and audio production devices they’ve built, as well their experimentation with visuals, that their creativity is an unrelenting force. Coldcut’s next creative pursuit is unknown but Matt has alluded to a visual representation of the @0 record in the works...

Get your copy of @0 mixed by both Coldcut and Mixmaster Morris.