Matt Black reveals the latest developments from the Coldcut tech lab
“If you make electronic music, these are exciting times. I can open Ableton Live on my six-year-old laptop and have access to synths and effects that would cost me hundreds of thousands of pounds. It’s also an audiovisual tool, a performance tool and my interface to the rest of the world. I can rock up anywhere with a laptop and an iPad, and make music.
“I’m not saying digital is ‘better’ than analogue because I still think there’s huge value in hardware, experimentation and circuit-bending. There is room for all approaches.
“Years ago, I said that computer interfaces need to move towards a more human approach. And, by that, I mean speech and touch. Yes, we’ve got things like the Artiphon Instrument 1, but I still think you’ll struggle to find an electronic instrument that has the degree of expression you get with a violin or a guitar.
“That’s the area we need to investigate, and that’s what’s happening with apps; music is beginning to move beyond the traditional idea of the skeuomorphic interface to what Peter Kirn calls ‘space interfaces’. An interface like the touchscreen, which doesn’t rely on knobs, buttons and sliders.
“We’ve already designed the Ninja Jamm app, which has got the power and the flexibility of a digital workstation with a touchscreen interface. You can use multiple fingers, which feels very different to just clicking on a screen and moving hi-hats around.
“The reason Coldcut develop apps and instruments like Ninja Jamm is because we want to use them. It was the same back in the 90s, when we were working on V-Jamm and then D-Jamm – the forerunner of Ninja Jamm. Fundamentally, they were designed for Coldcut, but they seemed to be so much fun that we decided to let everybody have a go.
“One of the main projects we’re working on at the moment is a… well, I’ve been referring to it as an arpeggiator on steroids. It’s a Max For Live patch called Midi-volve, and it’ll be available through Ableton’s online store in July, which is the first time we’ve had a proper partner for one of our inventions.
“I believe there’s a substantial untapped market for software that aids composition, especially for electronic music. We’ve already seen the likes of Sound-Prism and Arpeg-ginome, but our approach is related to older software like Cubase’s Interactive Phrase Synth, and M and Jam Factory. Unfortunately, although they were excellent and powerful programs, they were so complex as to baffle all but the most hardcore users.
“Midi-volve is intended to provide an easy-to-use source of musical ideas and the ability to evolve a simple ‘riff’ to keep it interesting. No musical theory necessary! It could be considered a kind of Buffer Shuffler for MIDI, combined with a souped-up arpeggiator.
“For a long time, I’ve dreamed about utilising user-controlled algorithmic variation to compose a piece as brilliant as Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, which uses subtle variation on simple parts to achieve complex, evolving results. Isn’t it about time we opened a new front in electronic music? One which goes beyond the current forms?
“Many years ago, inspired by Reich’s 18, I claim to have first invented the Buffer Shuffler/Glitch ‘cold cutter’ algorithm, later used in such plugins as Supa-Trigga, Glitch, Live-Cut and Ableton Beat Repeat. These all work by cutting a loop into equal-sized pieces, so that they can easily be reshuffled. With Midi-volve, we can work with notes of unequal lengths, as produced when cutting loops by transient like RECYCLE.
“And things are already beginning to move on again. I’ve got a copy of Jamm Pro on my laptop – the development version. The best of my ideas are going into that and Coldcut will be using it live, running it with Ableton Link.
“Jamm Pro will let you load your own samples, outputs MIDI notes and CCs to control visuals, has state-of-the-art effects including sidechaining and a decent Mastering Output module, scratching, and a new monster Cold-cutter engine, plus whole other modes that we’re keeping under wraps for now. I regard it as the world’s most advanced beat app.
“As I said earlier, it can be lots of fun standing in front of a giant analogue synth and getting stuck into all that hardware. But it’s damn convenient to be able to plug your iPad into your laptop on a plane and start work on a sound design job while your 30,000 feet in the air.”