Coldcut – What’s That Noise?, cutting the future into pieces

Released in 1989, What’s That Noise? captured the moment when sampling moved from DJ technique to a new form of composition. Coldcut brought hip-hop, house, dub and pop into the same restless collage – a debut album whose rough edges still carry the excitement of a future being invented in real time

Before collage became a method

Two years before the album, Coldcut had already offered a glimpse of what was coming. Originally limited to 500 copies, Say Kids What Time Is It? appeared in 1987, built entirely from fragments of records and spoken dialogue. Matt Black and Jonathan More openly extended the work of Double Dee & Steinski, but with the rudimentary equipment available to them: a Portastudio, a cassette deck and its analogue pause button.

That same year, their Seven Minutes of Madness remix of Eric B. & Rakim’s Paid in Full moved the original track into stranger territory. Rakim’s voice encountered Ofra Haza, sampled from Im Nin’alu, amid an accumulation of rhythms, dialogue and sounds drawn from distant sources. Completed during a 39-hour session, the remix became a landmark of British cut-and-paste production. Coldcut were no longer merely extending a track: they were dismantling it to find out what else it might contain.

With What’s That Noise?, released in April 1989, this way of thinking expanded for the first time across an entire album. The record reached number 20 on the UK Albums Chart and remained there for 4 weeks – proof that these experiments had already found a route into the mainstream.

A record that changes shape with every track

People Hold On opens the album with Lisa Stansfield. Her warm, direct voice rests upon a production in which house, funk and hip-hop still seem to be standing only a few inches apart. The track never disguises its construction, yet its melody is never sacrificed to technique. This was one of Coldcut’s defining achievements at the time: bringing experimentation into the charts without reducing it to decoration. Stansfield returns on My Telephone, a small soul comedy about waiting for a call. Ringing phones, voices and studio effects become the props of an almost theatrical scene. Stop This Crazy Thing, featuring Junior Reid, carries a far heavier tension. His reggae vocal confronts a dense production marked by dub and echo. Here, collage is no longer used simply for play: it supports a plea against violence and a machine spinning out of control.

The cast alone reveals the project’s freedom. Mark E. Smith of The Fall appears on (I’m) in Deep; Yazz returns with a new version of Doctorin’ the House; Queen Latifah features on Smoke Dis One on the American edition. Coldcut make no attempt to impose a superficial unity. Instead, the duo treats the album like a radio programme in which every guest alters the tone, the rhythm and even the definition of what is being heard. That diversity can also make the album feel scattered. Its songs, interludes and exercises in sonic disassembly do not always fit together with the precision of a concept record. Yet this unevenness is part of its energy. What’s That Noise? advances through sudden turns, as though Black and More were discovering their possibilities at the very moment they used them.

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After the Second Summer of Love

The album arrived only months after Britain’s Second Summer of Love, as acid house and rave culture were transforming nightlife. Coldcut belonged to that upheaval without making quite the same music. Their rhythms looked towards the club, but their approach remained informed by New York hip-hop, sound-system culture, pirate radio and the art of subversion inherited from cut-up. By 1989, sampling itself was no longer new. Coldcut’s singularity lay in the way they brought together the DIY practice of the DJ and the structure of pop songwriting. Their samples did more than sit on top of a rhythm: they interrupted, commented upon and occasionally contradicted the song. A telephone ring, a line from a film or a displaced percussion break could suddenly acquire the force of a chorus.

The album did not single-handedly invent trip-hop or big beat. It did, however, anticipate a method that would become central during the 1990s: combining distant sources, leaving the joins exposed and treating recorded culture as raw material. DJ Shadow, The Chemical Brothers, Fatboy Slim and several producers associated with Mo’Wax would later extend that logic in very different directions. When the album was released, the British weekly Sounds had already identified this tension between experimentation and commercial effectiveness, describing Coldcut as a duo who constantly “experiment, rob and hijack”, mixing the blatantly deranged with the instantly accessible. That instability remains one of the album’s finest qualities.

Hearing the first shock again

I wanted to return to this debut album to recover a particular feeling. Not merely a collection of tracks, but the impact of a period when we still had little idea where these machines, turntables and fragments of records might take us.

Listening again, What’s That Noise? has lost none of its appetite for play. Some of its production inevitably carries the sound of the late 1980s. The drums, scratches, chopped voices and certain effects immediately reveal their age. Yet this patina does not imprison the record. It reminds us that much of this music was being invented with limited equipment, before digital editing made every operation fast, clean and nearly invisible.

This may be why the album still communicates such momentum. We hear DJs and producers experimenting before they have settled upon a method, less interested in demonstrating their mastery than in discovering what might happen after the next cut. Matt Black summarised their approach in an interview recorded in 1999:

“We just do what we do. There’s never been any plan.”

– Matt Black, interviewed by Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton for DJ History, 14 April 1999.

After discovery came craftsmanship

By the time Sound Mirrors appeared in 2006, Coldcut were no longer alone in this territory. Over 17 years, sampling and digital production had become widespread practices. The duo had also founded Ninja Tune and helped to establish an entire family of artists capable of moving between hip-hop, jazz, dub and electronic music. Sound Mirrors remains a solid, ambitious album surrounded by an impressive cast of guests. Everything Is Under Control shows that Matt Black and Jonathan More could still produce something huge without abandoning their taste for collage. Yet the effect was no longer the same. This does not necessarily mean that the later record was weaker. The world around it had changed.

In 1989, much of this music seemed genuinely new. Boundaries appeared to collapse beneath every sample. By 2006, the tools had become more accessible, and countless producers had learned how to use this grammar. Coldcut had moved from the role of scouts to that of experienced craftsmen – and, through Ninja Tune, cultural transmitters. I did not find in Sound Mirrors the same shiver that What’s That Noise? had once produced. No record can preserve the shock of a first encounter indefinitely. This one nevertheless retains the imprint of that moment better than most: when 2 producers placed their records on a table and began cutting the future into pieces.

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