If that meant that the road to some of the deepest avant-dance albums of the last ten years ran through an early wave of comedic turntablism, quirky acid jazz, and some of the most British-eccentric takes on hip-hop production thinkable, that just makes the entirety of Ninja Tune’s whole 30-plus-year corpus feel even more astounding.Įstablished in 1990 by Matt Black and Jonathan More of cut-up wizards Coldcut, Ninja Tune first found its footing in the same hip-hop-besotted DJ circles that Coldcut helped popularize in the UK to start with in the late ’80s. That irreverence was fueled by the liberating potential of so many Wired-ready ’90s-futurist concepts: culture-jamming multimedia manipulation, a powerful belief in the aesthetic recontextualization that came from sample-based composition, and a por que no los dos refusal to adhere to punk’s old “fuck art, let’s dance” binary. In a UK-rooted post-rave landscape dominated by similarly-minded peers and successor labels from Warp to Mo’Wax to Planet Mu to Hyperdub, the spirited sense of irreverence that fueled much of Ninja Tune’s initial ascent still looms as a definitive part of dance music history. For a label that’s been releasing consistently trend-warping and creatively daring albums for over three decades, something about Ninja Tune still feels a little frivolous - not superficial or inane, but at least a bit refreshingly unserious.
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