Coldcut have always been fascinated with the fusion of sound and vision and so the idea of them curating a DVD version of 'Sound Mirrors' (their stunning and critically acclaimed album) is a fitting one. In collaboration with freelance music video commissioner Vez they set about taking the medium of the music video out of the realm of MTV and the cheesy promo, instead making the work a purely artistic expression of the music. In a move that takes the director out of the realm of painter for hire and giving them the creative recognition they so hugely deserve not only in the creative brief but in how they are presented on the DVD and that their fee is an advance against royalties for their work - the same as if they were a guest musician - an exciting and bold move. Individual video directors were specifically invited to add their creativity to a song, visually interpreting the chosen track in their own unique way. There was no brief except that if possible Coldcut were not to feature in the work and there was no pitching against other directors. The outcome is a stunningly diverse collection of highly creative music videos directed by a range of different directors from the famous to the unknown. From Clay Lispky's high-tech live action/animation techniques, the Fuzzy Felt pyrotechnic's of Woof Wan-Bau, Joel Trussell's Phileas Fogg-flavoured cartooning, Up The Resolution's jellyfish porn and Andreas Riser's seventies-patina'd tale of office despair the differences of approach and techniques are dazzling, dizzying, hilarious and moving. Smuggling Peanuts' Gilliamesque animation, Ne-O's salaryman rap, the vastly different approaches to computer animation employed by Oceanmonsters and Dianne Harris and Oscar Wright's surveillance camera epic complete a fantastic package, where you may have favourites but all are artistically valid. The flipside of this release is an audio CD collection of remixes of the singles taken from Sound Mirrors. Running from superb re-rubs from labelmates Spank Rock, Qemists, Kentaro and Daedelus, plus big names like Lemon Jelly and Tiga, plus the happeningest Switch/Solid Groove and Sway, this is a brilliant collection of music and also includes remixes of bonus track 'The State We're In' and the Coldcut classic, 'People Hold On'.
